Wasteland botany

"Wasteland weeds and flowers are as individual to the twenty-first-century English city as a forgotten coat of arms or motto. By the Eighties, [Oliver Lathe] Gilbert had surveyed many of England's wastelands and urban demolition sites, and noticed all manner of regional variations in their plant life...

Bristol was a buddleia city...succeeded by sycamore; traveller's joy was doing well, red valerian too, and there were naturalised fig trees on the banks of the Avon. There are branches of Starbucks, Carphone Warehouse, WH Smith, Dixons, Currys and McDonald's. Further West and over the border , Swansea was dominated by Japanese knotweed...and had much buddleia, hemp agrimony and pale toadflax; there was also red bartsia, silverweed, sea campion, buck's-horn plantain, polypod and ivy-leaved toadflax. There are branches of Starbucks, Carphone Warehouse, WH Smith, Dixons, Currys and McDonald's. Sheffield featured many garden escapees, blooming from June through to October in a succession of feverfew and goat's rue, tansy, soapwort and Michaelmas daisies. Pink-, purple- and white- flowered goat's rue covered the hillsides, and eastern rocket, wormwood and Yorkshire fog did well. There are branches of Starbucks, Carphone Warehouse, WH Smith, Dixons, Currys and McDonald's. Liverpool had many early successor populations of yellow crucifiers, lesser-hop trefoil, black medick, wall barley and melilots, ; hedge woundwort, cut-leaved cranesbill and evening primrose also flourished. There are branches of Starbucks, Carphone Warehouse, WH Smith, Dixons, Currys and McDonald's..."

p142 "Edgelands: Journeys into England's true Wilderness" by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts