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E-book The Botanical City
In Betty Smith’s description of the tree of heaven (Ailanthus altissima), also known as the “ghetto palm,” the tree is contrasted with the memory of a school poem that evoked the “forest primeval” with its “murmuring pines and hemlocks.” For Smith, writing in the early 1940s, the presence of this tree was a marker, or even harbinger, of neighbourhood decline. The tree of heaven serves as a symbol of
an American modernity gone awry. In this essay collection, by contrast, we are interested in disentangling some of these aesthetic and ideological strands that suffuse the idea of “weeds” or “alien plants” in the urban landscape. We explore a series of intersections between cultural and scientific readings of urban space in which the presence of spontaneous plant life serves as a portal into alternative interpretations of urban nature.
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