This is a transcription of an interview conducted by artist Ben Hartley for Episode 4 of Bricks Bristol podcast in December.
Ben writes: Ruderals are plant species that colonise areas of land that have experienced a disturbance. The pioneer species are the most hardy, and are the very first to colonise a barren environment, such as an abandoned site or recently demolished building.
The word Ruderal, originates from the Latin “rubus”, meaning rubble. Ruderals can be interchangeably called weeds.
Ruderals are commonly found growing through cracks in the concrete, through gaps in walls, along fences and paths, or blanketing uneven and rubbish-strewn brownfield sites in urban areas.
Click the link below to listen to the entire episode with contributions from Kate McClymont and Henry Palmer.
https://www.bricksbristol.org/2020/12/episode-4-ben-hartley-ruderal/
My name is Sean Roy Parker. I’m an artist, educator and cook based in south London. Thinking about ruderals as ‘experimental beings’ makes me feel incredibly warm to them on a physiological level. I feel kin with them. They look for potential life and potential opportunities in favourable conditions. Sounds like I’m sort of describing myself. They find new patches of earth, pulling out nitrogen, magnesium, phosphorus. They re-naturalise soil and collect more debris as it blows past and this in turn creates more hospitable environment for the less adaptable species. They attract wildlife: mostly pollinators like bees and butterflies, but also slugs, snails, flies, rodents who are looking for food and habitat.
The idea of ‘wildness’ is something that I’m super interested in. Our idea in the city of ‘wild’ is extremely sanitised and we need to embrace the chaos of unfettered weeds. Educate ourselves on culinary, medicinal and practical uses instead of dismissing them. We have a national case of ‘plant blindness’, especially moving through lockdown, when people were spending more isolated time outside. Thinking about projects like the lady in north London who has been, or I think it maybe started in Germany, where they’ve been drawing or writing the names of weeds and trees on the pavement in chalk. So, there’s this kind of sharing of resources and I like a new impetus to gain knowledge about non-native species.
So artists are obviously an integral part of the gentrification process, where they move on from newly gentrified areas where they’ve been out-priced and then move on to lesser known neighbourhoods where it’s cheap and sometimes unfashionable. You’ve got this influx of predominately white art students, let’s say, and they can really overwhelm and overload the local ecology. There are usually some warehouses which become studio complexes. And this paves the way for sort of ‘culture vultures’ and speculative capitalists in the form of boutiques and restaurants, who propose to feed the masses affordably, but end up attracting a lot of local tourism.
The cycle is complete when the ‘Big Lads’ move in. You know, supermarkets and chain restaurants. They compete with the small independent businesses and then basically the rents become too high for anyone to stay there. Also, to think about the small business owners, you know maybe the ‘early adopters’ in terms of the artists moving into the area, who are more maybe more adaptable than some of the existing businesses in that way, you know. They have their foot in the door with artists and they’re able, you know, they have like strong social media presence or whatever it is, and they’re much more flexible in terms of how they update and upgrade their business to fit with the times. So, in this way, you’ve got savvy, independent business owners that are almost like aspirational, in the sense of they are upwardly mobile, while pretending to care for and support local businesses who were existing there before. I find it’s really difficult to uncouple the two: artists and gentrifiers. Artists are a litmus paper, if you like. ‘Anti-capitalism’ becomes ‘aesthetic capitalism’.
I live in Lewisham which is in south London. It’s pretty urban, pretty grey. The streets look like they’re kind of regularly sprayed with glyphosate and I never notice much pavement vegetation, which is something that I normally look for whenever I’m outside. There are plenty of shrubby areas, but I think, to be honest, the council spends a lot of money keeping the pavements clean and clear. I think it’s either a request from their constituents or has just become the norm. For me, this reinforces the nature/human dichotomy that Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher described in their book The Conservation Revolution. Seeing humans as separate from nature, which disconnects us from our surroundings and creates commercial opportunities.
My favourite spot is down by the river in Brookmill park where the Ravensbourne shoots around the corner under a modernist train station. I often pick alexanders, which are in my top edibles, and recently found some water-mint, winter-cress and some bog-myrtle. There are a few more kind of unplanned spaces, like a car park opposite the shopping centre, which is home to a carpet of lambs tongue, plantain and dandelion. It’s got a low wooden barrier, so it’s less trodden on by the public. There’s also a spot in Deptford next to a train track, that has a lot of sow thistle. I really like the mature stems which are hollow and hexagonal and taste like a crisp iceberg lettuce leaf. It’s a very vivid memory of my childhood: my mum used to make me peanut butter and lettuce sandwiches, so I kind of swap out the lettuce for sow thistle.