An Urban Field Guide to the Plants, Trees, and Herbs in Your Path

An Urban Field Guide to the Plants, Trees, and Herbs in Your Path

Part of the DIY Series

© Maggie Herskovits, January 2025

This edition © Microcosm Publishing, 2025

First Edition, 3,000 copies, first published Feb 2025

eBook ISBN 9781648412967

This is Microcosm #844

Designed by Joe Biel

Edited by Kandi Zeller

Illustrated by Maggie Herskovits

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Microcosm Publishing is Portland’s most diversified publishing house and distributor, with a focus on the colorful, authentic, and empowering. Our books and zines have put your power in your hands since 1996, equipping readers to make positive changes in their lives and in the world around them. Microcosm emphasizes skill-building, showing hidden histories, and fostering creativity through challenging conventional publishing wisdom with books and bookettes about DIY skills, food, bicycling, gender, self-care, and social justice. What was once a distro and record label started by Joe Biel in a drafty bedroom was determined to be Publishers Weekly’s fastest-growing publisher of 2022 and #3 in 2023, and is now among the oldest independent publishing houses in Portland, OR, and Cleveland, OH. Biel is also the winner of PubWest’s Innovator Award in 2024. We are a politically moderate, centrist publisher in a world that has inched to the right for the past 80 years.

To my grandmothers: Clarice Hoffer and Agnes Herskovits

Thank you to all the people and plants that made this book possible

I really believe that to stay home, to learn the names of things, to realize who we live among . . . The notion that we can extend our sense of community, our idea of community, to include all life forms—plants, animals, rocks, rivers and human beings—then I believe a politics of place emerges where we are deeply accountable to our communities, to our neighborhoods, to our home. Otherwise, who is there to chart the changes?

—Terry Tempest Williams, The Politics of Place: An Interview with Terry Tempest Williams

Table of Contents

Introduction •

Herbaceous Plants •

Asiatic Dayflower •

Black Nightshade •

Bladder Campion •

Broadleaf Plantain •

Burdock •

Canada Goldenrod •

Chickweed •

Chicory •

Cleavers •

Coltsfoot •

Common Blue Violet •

Crown Vetch •

Curly Dock •

Daisy Fleabane •

Dandelion •

Evening Primrose •

Galinsoga •

Garlic Mustard •

Green Foxtail •

Ground Ivy •

Hairy Bittercress •

Hedge Bindweed •

Horseweed •

Japanese Knotweed •

Jewelweed •

Lambsquarters •

Mallow •

Milkweed •

Mugwort •

Mullein •

Pennsylvania Smartweed •

Pineapple Weed •

Pokeweed •

Prickly Lettuce •

Purslane •

Quackgrass •

Ragweed •

Red Clover •

Redroot Pigweed •

Reed •

Shepherd’s Purse •

Smooth Crabgrass •

Spotted Spurge •

St. John’s Wort •

Stinging Nettles •

Virginia Pepperweed •

Wild Carrot •

Yellow Rocket •

Yellow Woodsorrel •

Woody Plants •

Black Cherry •

Empress Tree •

Hackberry •

Norway Maple •

Quaking Aspen •

Staghorn Sumac •

Tree-of-Heaven •

Virginia Creeper •

White Mulberry •

Resources and Further Reading •

Glossary of Terms •

Introduction

I got to know many of the plants in this book intimately during my time spent as a gardener in a New York City park. I first learned their names and how to identify them in order to rip them from the soil. In our clean garden plan, they were considered invaders. We used to joke as gardeners that weeds were our job security, for as long as there were weeds we had a job to do. And there were always weeds.

And then one day, two years in, I saw things differently. What I saw was a lone lambsquarter growing discreetly within a patch of Persicaria virginiana. A seed had taken advantage of a small opening that allowed just enough light to sprout. The plant then took on a very slender form to fit in this hiding place and stopped growing just when it reached the height of the surrounding Persicaria. Genius. Buds were bulging, ready to blossom, aliveness was gushing. You could not see it from the edge of the garden bed, and so it was not interrupting the integrity of the planting plan. My first act of rebellion was to let it live.

Up until that moment I prided myself in being able to find the most hidden weeds, remove the subversive beings and keep the garden clean. From that day forward, I joined in on their subversion. I still found them alright and when I did, I knelt close and marveled at just how cunning these plants were.

This gardener’s existential crisis brought me to know these plants beyond the label of weed. I got to know them for who they are, up close and personal. They learned about me, and we shared lessons and stories of life. Come take a walk with me on the pathway to relationship with spontaneous urban plants. You know, the plants on the block that seem to come from nowhere and grow from thin air. But everything is connected and nothing comes from nothing. Seeds are spread by birds, wind, and you. They land in cracks of concrete, vacant lots, and other city habitats. The newly sprouted plants grow to form seeds of their own and thus continue the cycle.

• • •

This field guide is filled with stories of plants that inhabit the cities of North America (Turtle Island). Some were present pre-colonization, some were introduced intentionally, and still others traveled here using us humans and other animals as unwitting carriers—mixed into boat ballast, hidden in bags of grain, tucked into packing materials, or stuck in cow hooves, just a few examples of the endless possibilities of plant travel.

No matter how or when they got to this land, the plants that thrive in the city do so because of their tolerance to all of the challenging factors that make up the urban environment. Even though the city is a relatively new place here on Earth, and no plant grew up or evolved here, the adaptations plants developed to survive are well suited to the urban environment. The plants that grace our urban home developed their survival traits over countless generations to become a perfect fit for the place where they were born. Plants that thrive in the urban environment have evolved in places of Mother Earth’s constant shifts and edges. As Richard Mabey writes:

A good proportion . . . made a life in the planet’s most restless places. They’d evolved on tide pounded beaches and the precarious slopes of volcanoes, in the flood zones at the edges of rivers and the muddy wallows made by wild grazing animals, in scree and shingle and glacial moraines.

They do well here because the urban ecosystem is also a restless place, a fact illuminated in its Latinate name: ruderal ecosystem. Ruderal comes from the Latin word rudus, meaning rubble. Here in the rubble lives are lived—plants, insects, birds, raccoons, squirrels, dogs, and more—all interacting with each other and the environment, an active ecosystem. That’s right, city plants and animals (yes, that includes us humans) are among the living organisms that interact within the ruderal ecosystem.

For the most part, the urban ecosystem is human-made and human-run, but our structures still exist upon and within the complex systems of Mother Earth. Our cities are subject to her weather as well as her rare, yet formidable, natural disasters, but the everyday actions of humans create the conditions that form the environment of the urban ecosystem.