Friday, 19 September 2025

History Bakers: Hotham Estate Shortbread Recipe (The Great British Bake Off – Week 2 – Biscuits)

History Bakers: Hotham Estate Shortbread Recipe (The Great British Bake Off – Week 2 – Biscuits)

I am currently going through our old blogs to make sure they are saved for posterity, and in doing so, I have seen a great many fascinating initiatives undertaken by the History Centre, my favourite of which was admittedly Hullcraft—whereby a dedicated Minecraft server was set up for people to build recreations of the Hull History Centre alongside a series of famous local buildings. This was done in 2014-15 to promote a new collection relating to the firm Francis Johnson and Partners, Architects (U DFJ).

Another initiative that caught my eye was History Bakers. After I had chatted to a few members of staff about it, we decided that it would be simple enough and popular enough to bring back. When colleagues mentioned that the Great British Bake off was returning in September, it seemed like the best possible time.

The original History Bakers blogs ran from 9th March 2015 until 22nd December 2016. 19 dishes were made by 11 members of staff and Verity Minniti has the distinction of making both the first and last dishes of that run.

As a result of our reintroduction of History Bakers, the History Centre team has raised £200 for famine relief for the Sameer Project (www.chuffed.org).

Biscuit recipes seemed to be popular amongst the staff and we have already had one blog on them, so here is another (with more to come). 

The first day of ‘official’ Biscuit Week at the Hull History Centre proved to be very busy as 9th September was the date for this month’s lunchtime talk. The talk was ‘Sister Agnes Walsh: Hull-born Hero of the Holocaust’ and it was delivered by her great-nephew Ian Judson. Sister Agnes was a nun who saved a Jewish family named Cremieux by hiding them from the Nazis at the St Vincent de Paul convent in Cadouin, southwest France. Alain Cremieux, who was seven years old at the time, attended the talk in person. Judson has also written a book on the subject ‘Auntie Ada: The Unlikeliest Hero of the Holocaust.’

In addition to having the chance to share in this fascinating piece of local history, September 9th was also the date of a visitation by several important figures from The National Archives, who came to award the Hull History Centre with its Accreditation Certificate:

Saul Nassé - Chief Executive and Keeper of The National Archives

Liz Harper – Sector Development Manager for Yorkshire and the North-East

David Morris – Head of Regional and Networks Team

According to the infallible Wikipedia, Saul Nassé had a previous role as Controller of BBC Learning in 2010 and the first series of the Great British Bake Off was aired in August that year. I thought it would be fun to offer up some freshly baked goods to our visitors and involve them in the History Bakers project. I did not want to pile the pressure onto one person to bake for all the staff at the History Centre and our guests for the day, so I asked everyone who was able to if they could bake something for this week. Laurel made some delicious ginger fairlings and Sophie created a tasty biscuit with a pear jam centre. I made some shortbread and Claire brought in a lovely caraway seed cake that she did not have the chance to bake in time for cake week.

Image: From left to right: Saul Nassé, Martin Taylor,
Laurel Edwards, Claire Weatherall, and David Morris.
Our guests from TNA were enjoying some sugar
jumbles with pear jam, courtesy of Sophie and Kyle.


Shortbread – U DDHO/19/8

I felt slightly guilty for choosing a recipe from 1962 for my first attempt, which you shall have to wait for pastry week to learn more about. To make up for this, I went back another century to try out this shortbread recipe I found in the Hotham Family Papers, it is dated c.1860. I also chose this recipe because it had three ingredients and relatively few instructions which suited my last-minute decision to bake something this week.

The first thing I did was attempt to transcribe the recipe and change the measurements from imperial to metric. Below is a scan of the recipe along with my transcription and a photograph of the ingredients I used:

2 lbs of flour (907g) 

1lb of good butter (454g) 

0.5 lbs of finest raw sugar (227g) 

 Rub the whole together until it becomes dough + then roll it out the size you wish the cake which is usually from half to three quarters of an inch in thickness. 

Bake it in an oven about the heat that would do for bread not hotter as it easily burns from being [so wet]. Add if liked sugar + plums + candied [citron] or orange.

Image: Recipe, U DDHO/19/8

This recipe is quite specific about using “good” butter and the “finest raw sugar.” Because there were only three ingredients, I knew I had to take these adjectives seriously. I know what good butter is, but I had never thought about a particular brand of sugar being better than any other. I went to my local shop and said to the person at the counter, “Please can you help me? I am baking some shortbread and I require only the finest raw sugar.” I don’t believe in fate or higher powers, but something must have been working in my favour because the finest raw sugar just happened to be the only brand they had in the shop at that time! What are the odds? 

Once I had measured out the ingredients, I put them all in my biggest mixing bowl and felt a moment of dread as it was over four fifths full. I would recommend reducing the overall amount of ingredients the first time you attempt this recipe.

For at least the next forty-five minutes I carefully and laboriously mixed the three ingredients together with a silicon spoon until they finally began to resemble dough. As I stood there, mixing and dissociating, my thoughts turned to a documentary I had once watched featuring the indigenous Mawé people of Amazonas, Brazil. The Mawé ritual for initiation as a warrior involves wearing a glove filled with bullet ants for 10 whole minutes, they do this repeatedly over weeks or months. Just as I began to feel like I was practising for such a ritual, I looked down at my fresh dough and felt a keen sense of achievement.

Image: The mixed ingredients

I turned the oven to 190 degrees Celsius and split the dough into two parts, which I rolled out into squares with a rolling pin. The first square was roughly half-an-inch to three-quarters of an inch tall and I left it in the oven for around 35-40 minutes. When I took it out of the oven, it was a little more brittle than I would have liked, so I made the next batch roughly an inch tall and cooked it for around 45 minutes. Unfortunately, it came out ever-so-slightly soft in the middle, but it tasted just fine.

The recipe itself was great, but with hindsight I should have been more precise when measuring the height of the uncooked dough squares. I finished most of the shortbread with a dusting of sugar and it was ready to serve.

Image: The finished shortbread

I fed the finished shortbread to the people in my house, eliciting these reactions:

Dilara - “That’s tasty. The mix is brilliant, not too sweet.”
Joey - “Delicious, but a bit too thick.”
Sofya - “Nice, but too thick and so a little undercooked in the middle.”

Then I brought my shortbread into work where people said the following:

Pete – “Possibly the best short bread I have ever had – a more robust density than the usual type, and a little more savoury. Both these qualities recommend it to my palate – I had two helpings and enjoyed both a great deal.”
Sarah – “Yummy!”
Caoimhe – “Melts in mouth.”
Rachel – “Beautiful texture, crunchy and melty at the same time and a good thick slab!”
Lucy – Delicious! Very light & tasty, and not overpoweringly sweet!”
Kyle – “Tastes like shortbread,  not overly crumbly which is nice.”
Laurel – “Nice shortbread, not overly sweet.”


Monday, 15 September 2025

History Bakers: Mrs Palmer’s Sugar Jumbles with Pear Jam (The Great British Bake Off - Week 2 – Biscuits)

History Bakers: Mrs Palmer’s Sugar Jumbles with Pear Jam (The Great British Bake Off - Week 2 – Biscuits)

To tie in with the Great British Bake Off this year staff at the History Centre have decided to gather historic recipes and try them out. With biscuit week just gone here is one of our recipes for biscuits.

Image: U DDHO/19/2 

The recipe dates to the c.1777 and comes from a cook and medicinal book in the hands of the Hotham family of South Dalton. The book contains many recipes we would recognise today, such as Gingerbread but also some that you would go to the doctors for such as a cure for the bite of a mad dog. I chose Sugar Jumbles as I wanted to try something that was not as well known about today.

The Jumble or Iombils first appears in Thomas Dawson’s The Second part of The Good Huswifes Jewell, published in 1597. Though the biscuit is said to date to the Wars of the Roses. The Dawson recipe includes many spices that were new and popular at the time, such as aniseed, caraway and mace.

The version in our recipe book is similar but instead includes the peel of a lemon. The recipe provides very little information, and some baking knowledge is required when making them (as such I left the actual baking to my wife, and I helpfully assisted with the washing up).

The recipe called for:

1lb of flour
1 lb of 6d sugar
4 yolks and 2 egg whites
A piece of butter as big as a large walnut
A spoonful of cream & the peel of a large lemon. Shred fine.

I assumed that 6 pence sugar was a grade of sugar but could not find a specific description of what a modern equivalent would be so regular granulated sugar was used. Clotted cream was used for the ‘cream’ as this was widely available at the time. We did not have a lemon at the time but we had an orange, so we used this as the citrus element instead.

The various ingredients were added together in a mixing bowl which resulted in a rather dry mixture that when compressed together, resembled marzipan, likely due to the amount of sugar in the mixture. Originally Jumbles were made into rings or knots, but we opted for round biscuits for simplicity.

Image: Ingredients before and after mixing

In addition to the Jumbles, we intended to make something called a Fruit Biscuit, which was more akin to a fruit leather than a biscuit. The recipe came from the same book, and involved boiling either, pears, plumbs, apricots or quinces and boiling them before pushing the pulp through a fine sieve.

After peeling and boiling down 3 pears then pressing through a sieve, we added this to 200 grams of caster sugar. The recipe called for double refined sugar which was then sifted. Once again, I could not find a description or exact modern equivalent which is why we decided on caster sugar. The recipe then instructed that the mixture was

beat…as you do eggs for two hours without stopping

Neither of us fancied this task and so we opted to use an electric mixer to speed things up which did not seem to do very much. So, we decided to boil it down further and use it on top of the jumbles instead by carving out a small space on the top. 


Image: Sugar Jumbles with Pear Jam

Thursday, 11 September 2025

History Bakers: Seed Cake (The Great British Bake Off - Week 1 – Cakes)

To tie in with the Great British Bake Off this year, staff at the History Centre have decided to gather historic recipes and try them out. With cake kicking things off on the show this series, we thought we’d start there so here is one of our recipes for cake:

Recipe for 'Seed Cake' [U DDSY3/10/6, pp.18-19]

The recipe comes from a transcript of a 17th century recipe book, which can be found within the Sykes Family collection [U DDSY]. The transcript was created during the early 20th century whilst Sir Mark Sykes was head of the family. Unfortunately, the actual recipe book does not appear to have survived but the transcript captures the 17th century spelling and style of the original.

I chose this recipe because I love unusual flavourings, such as cardamom, and wanted to see how caraway matched up. Additionally, it’s a straightforward 1:1:1 cake recipe so I thought I couldn’t go too wrong with it. This was particularly important because I decided to try making the cake gluten free and coeliac friendly (we like to make sure everyone can take part), so having the equal ratios would make substituting gluten free flours slightly easier. 

On that note, I chose to use a shop bought gluten free self-raising flour and added almond flour to improve the moisture content and texture of the finished cake. Using shop bought gluten free flour alone can lead to gritty and slightly dry cakes. I also chose to use less eggs than the recipe suggests. This was to adjust for the added raising agents in the shop bought flour and the higher moisture content of the almond flour as compared to wheat flour.

As you can see from the image at the beginning of this post, the original recipe gives exact ingredient amounts along with a clear method. Once I had my gluten free adjustments sorted, there was little for me to do but to start measuring and follow the recipe. In case you want to have a go yourself, the following outlines the ingredients as stated in the recipe and shows how these were translated to metric quantities and adjusted for gluten free baking.

Original ingredients:

  • 1 pound butter
  • 1 pound flour
  • 1 pound sugar
  • 2 ounces caraway seeds
  • 10 eggs plus 5 whites

Adjusted to be coeliac friendly:

  • 450g butter (I only had salted but might have chosen unsalted if had the option)
  • 100g ground almonds plus 354g gluten free self-raising flour (I used Doves Freee)
  • 454g caster sugar
  • 57g caraway seeds
  • 6 eggs plus 140ml whole milk

Getting the oven temperature correct required a bit of guesswork, but a quick reference to the baking times and temperatures for a basic cake mix helped there. I decided to split the quantity of batter across two loaf tins, as this recipe makes a lot of batter, and I didn’t want to have the oven going for two hours! I’ve outlined the method I used below, which adds a bit more detail to the original recipe:

  1. Heat oven to 170°C (guessed at this temperature based on a standard equal quantities cake recipe, such as you might find in the good old Bero book!)
  2. Line two loaf tins with greaseproof paper (probably should have greased them if I was being completely authentic but I didn’t think until it was too late!)
  3. Cream butter in a large bowl (using a wooden spoon, I didn’t cheat by using an electric hand mixer although I really wanted to!)
  4. Beat eggs into butter (used a hand whisk, really wanted to use that electric hand mixer!)
  5. In a separate bowl, mix sugar, flour and caraway seeds together
  6. Add dry ingredients to the butter and eggs a bit at a time until well combined (at this stage my mix was a bit dry so I added 140ml milk)
  7. Pour into two loaf tins (at this point I went a bit maverick and sprinkled some brown sugar over the top to give the cake to give it a crisp and crunchy top) 
  8. Bake in the oven for 1 hour (my oven runs on the hot side and the cake came out a darker golden than expected, so 50 minutes might have done it)

Apologies to all, but I forgot to take photographs during the baking process. However, I was really pleased with how it turned out, and I’ve now added caraway seeds to my baking cupboard staples! 

The finished cake - with a bit missing because it got stuck on the tin!

Here’s what our staff taste testers thought – I particularly enjoyed ‘Spiffing!’ as a comment, not a word you hear very often anymore:

  • Delicious! Very light and moist with a delicate hint of caraway
  • Yummy – light & fluffy – lovely taste of caraway
  • Really tasty – unique flavour – thank you
  • Thoroughly enjoyable, just the right amount of sweetness and a nice spongy texture
  • Super yummy, really fluffy & light
  • Spiffing!
  • Wouldn’t know its gluten free, smells like cake and the caraway is nice
  • Liked it enough that I have copied recipe to bake at home!
  • So soft and fluffy and a lovely rich caraway flavour
Why not have a go yourself and let us know how you get on via the History Centre’s social media channels…


Monday, 28 July 2025

Botanising on bomb sites: Eva Crackles’ studies of Hull’s flowering plants

Eva Crackles with a 12-inch puffball mushroom (U DEC 1998/05/9/91)

It’s easy to think that living and working in the city, we can become somewhat nature-starved, and that we have to make our way out into the countryside to a nature reserve like Spurn or Allerthorpe Common in order to ‘properly’ experience the natural world. But Eva Crackles, one of Hull’s best-known naturalists, saw the city centre not as a place devoid of botanical and environmental value, but as a treasure trove for discovering lots of unexpected and rare plants – it’s just a case of knowing how and where to look.

In my last blog, I wrote about Eva’s early passion for birdwatching, explaining how her enthusiasm for birding began to fade at the start of the 1950s, leading Eva to start searching for an area of natural history in which interesting species were more readily available and close to her home in Hull. What especially captured her attention were the many waste places and bombed sites in Hull, which appeared during and after the Second World War when buildings were destroyed or damaged during the air raids on the city. Despite the devastation through which these spaces were created, Eva started to notice that they were now teeming with life: new and unfamiliar plant species were squeezing through cracks in the concrete, colonising piles of rubble and filling the city with blooms of colour.

Eva’s botanical career began in these urban spaces, and she frequently found sites of botanical interest and delight in the city throughout the decades. In this blog, I explore how and where Eva botanised in the city of Hull, and show how her engagement with the city’s flowering plants changed over time.

Bomb site botany

In an unfinished piece about the flowering plants found on Hull’s bomb sites, Eva writes that:

When Jerry succeeded as he did in the regrettable business of reducing so many of our houses, our shops, our warehouses and our factories to a heap of bricks […] [this] was instrumental in providing the botanist […] with a golden opportunity of studying the subsequent colonisation by plants of large patches of bare ground. […] Here was the chance to discover just what species would turn up first, which would manage to establish themselves in the prevailing conditions of high lime concentration and of burnt ground, which would be eventually successful in competition with other species and which would resist man’s great efforts […]. (U DEC 1998/05/20/178)

Piece of writing about flowering plants of bomb sites (U DEC 1998/05/20/178)

This paragraph shows how Eva was especially attracted to the bomb sites of Hull because of their potential for conducting important scientific research into ecological succession, the process by which plant and animal communities in an area change over time. All over the UK, sites that were cleared during the Blitz became of great interest to ecologists – in the City of London, for instance, the Second World War was the first time open ground had been made available since the Great Fire of London in 1666, and these areas were soon home to a range of pioneering plant species (McArthur 2015).

Extract of talk written for broadcast about plants in Hull city centre (U DEC 1998/05/25/213)

This was certainly the case in Hull, too, as Eva describes in a radio broadcast: “Before the war this was a highly built up area and wild plants must have been exceedingly rare, although there were interesting plants on the dock-land wastes” (U DEC 1998/05/25/213). Over the period from 1950 to 1953, Eva visited 350 bomb sites and ‘waste places’ in the city of Hull, recording in detail what kinds of plants were present at 250 of these, a remarkable effort observable in the countless notebooks and folders of notes held in her collection at Hull History Centre. The table below, for example, shows a collated list of plants recorded in different regions of the city, indicating the sheer variety and quantity of plant life thriving in these devastated spaces (U DEC 1998/05/20/175 OR 18/166). Many of these are familiar sights in urban areas, with species like Common Groundsel (Senecio vulgaris), Scentless False Mayweed (Matricaria inodora), White Clover (Trifolium repens), and Rosebay Willowherb (Epilobium angustifolium) present.

List of bomb site plants in Hull (U DEC 1998/05/20/177)

In the above-mentioned broadcast, Eva explains further that she had initially intended to focus on four alien species that were establishing themselves in the city – Oxford Ragwort (Senecio squalidus), Eastern Rocket (Sisymbrium orientale), Tall Rocket (Sisymbrium altissimum) and Sticky Groundsel (Senecio viscosus) – but decided to accept “the challenge of identifying every plant I met”, resulting in her recording an astounding 270 species (U DEC 1998/05/25/213). She goes on to describe how her investigations into the bomb sites pushed her to ask the question ‘why’, demonstrating both her curiosity and her expertise:

Why was a plant in one place and not in another[?] In the circumstances such questioning focussed attention on methods of dispersal and the most useful exercise was to plot the sites on which thirty or more species occurred. (U DEC 1998/05/25/213)

These early investigations pushed Eva to think more about how plant distributions are affected by a range of nonhuman and human factors, and this curiosity (as well as the purchase of a motorbike and later a car) led her out of the city to explore other parts of East Yorkshire. This doesn’t mean, however, that Hull became any less important to her.

Planting the seeds of interest

Eva’s botanical investigations took her all over the county, and she was soon appointed the official recorder for vice county 61 (S.E. Yorkshire) for the Botanical Society of Britain & Ireland (BSBI), a role she held until 1998, she started to regularly publish notes and short articles in specialist botanical journals, and she would regularly visit botanically significant places like Spurn, Leven Canal, and Pulfin Bog.

Her studies, undertaken while also working full-time as Head of Biology at Malet Lambert School, began to make her somewhat of a local celebrity. The Eva Crackles collection contains numerous cuttings from various local newspapers from the 1950s onwards that are about Eva or that involve her in some way. An early example from 1952 is titled ‘Hull teacher discovers rare bomb-site plants’, and discusses some of the rare species she was finding in these places, but also reveals her sense of humour when talking about people’s reaction to her work: “People are quite curious, but recently I have found a few – a very few – who have been genuinely interested and have helped me quite a lot. The majority, however, are just curious and think I am quite crazy.” (U DEC 1998/05/9/91).

Newspaper article about Eva’s bomb site studies, 1952 (U DEC 1998/05/9/91)
Newspaper article about the ‘Slender speedwell’, 1972 (U DEC 1998/05/9/91)

Another example from 1972 comes from the ‘John Humber’ column, written by Mike Thompson, who employs Eva’s expertise in an article entitled ‘Has your lawn got the “Speedwell blues”’? (U DEC 1998/05/9/91). The column is about the Slender Speedwell (Veronica filiformis), an invasive blue flower that can easily overwhelm garden lawns, so Eva requests readers to send her information and cuttings of the flowers by post for her to identify. I wish I’d read this one before I opened an envelope and was surprised by a dried clump of Speedwell (that I thought was a spider) falling out onto the table!

In June 1978, Eva published her first article in the Hull Daily Mail in a series that came to be known as ‘Crackles Country’, a piece entitled ‘Observe these ‘foreigners’ whilst you may…’ (U DEC 1998/05/9/90). She writes: “In June many species of wild plant will burst into full flower and this is as true of Hull’s city centre as of the surrounding countryside”, and asks: “How many of Hull’s citizens notice the wild flowers on the car parks, by pavements and on walls?”. The focus of this article is on the Oxford Ragwort, which was, at the time, abundant throughout the city, especially around the Old Town and the docks.

Crackles Country article about the Oxford Ragwort, 1978 (U DEC 1998/05/9/90)
Crackles Country article about weeds, 1978 (U DEC 1998/05/9/90)

What is interesting about Eva’s celebration of urban flora in this article and throughout the series is that she never discriminates against ‘weeds’, always marvelling at the capacity of any plant, ‘alien’ or ‘native’, to flourish in the most unexpected of places. Indeed, the second article in the series asks readers to ‘Spare a thought for the weeds’, questioning the notion of a ‘plant out of place’ and whether there is a case for “affording hospitality to the less aggressive, less common ‘weeds’” (U DEC 1998/05/9/90). This attitude seems unusually modern, and brings to mind the writer Richard Mabey’s definition of ‘weeds’ as “boundary breakers, the stateless minority […] who remind us that life is not that tidy” (2012).

Crackles Country article about the High Street, 1979 (U DEC 1998/05/9/90)

Eva also wrote articles explaining how and why some plants were growing in certain areas, communicating research she was publishing in more specialist journals to a wider audience. An article from 1979, for example, tells us that, at the time, the High Street was home to a considerable number of native and non-native plant species such as Flax, Buckwheat and Coriander, either deliberately or accidentally transported to Hull via boat (U DEC 1998/05/9/90). The article ends, however, with Eva lamenting the imminent loss of these plants to redevelopment: “Great-grandfather’s birthplace is under the new road, the bulldozers have moved on to the last remaining High-street sites and an era which began with Hitler’s bombs will soon virtually end with ‘Operation Clean Up’”.

Observe, Record, Think

Eva’s concern with the loss of places in Hull that held botanical value isn’t surprising, as throughout her career she was involved in various conservation battles across East Yorkshire, such as at Allerthorpe Common and in Kilnsea near Spurn. In the collection, there are several letters and reports written by Eva and others in the late 1970s and early 1980s, relating to different aspects of Operation Clean Up, a government programme that offered grants to local authorities to ‘tidy up’ waste areas in their cities.

A letter of 22 March 1979 from Sarah N. Priest of the Nature Conservancy Council to the Director of Leisure Services in Hull City Council provides a summary of Eva’s detailed report on the scientific value of some of the waste places in the city, and concludes: “I very much hope that your plans to clean-up the City centre might be sufficiently flexible to allow at least parts of these sites to remain as temporary nature reserves with the minimum of tidying up.” (U DEC 1998/05/31/276) She continues: “In anticipation of your sympathetic consideration of such a suggestion, I wonder if it might be helpful for Miss Crackles and I to visit these sites with one of your staff and point out the precise areas of interest?”, showing how well-known Eva had become for her knowledge of East Yorkshire’s flowering plants.


Letter from S.N. Priest about Operation Clean Up, 1979 (U DEC 1998/05/31/276)
Piece written by Eva about Operation Clean Up (U DEC 1998/05/31/276)

Cities are always changing, of course, but Eva’s defence of the city’s waste places is certainly something to be admired, and she sums up her reasoning in a short piece of writing: “It seems a pity if these riches are to be destroyed in the tidying up process. Is there no other answer to the problem?” (U DEC 1998/05/31/276).

There is, however, plenty of evidence showing that Eva continued to botanise in Hull in the 1980s in her notebooks and in newspaper cuttings, after she retired from teaching and was working on publishing her book, The Flora of the East Riding of Yorkshire (1990). And walking round the city today, it’s very clear that, rather than being entirely clear of wild plants, numerous wildflower species are still finding places in which to establish themselves.


Article ‘Observe, Record, Think’ written by Eva (U DEC 1998/05/31/291)


Extract of talk written for broadcast about plants in Hull city centre (U DEC 1998/05/25/213)

I want to end by drawing attention to a short article published in the Yorkshire Naturalists’ Trust Bulletin entitled ‘Botanical comment 1: Observe, Record, Think’, the first of a series of ‘comments’ that Eva contributed to the journal (U DEC 1998/05/32/291). As the title suggests, she provides practical advice on how to improve your field botany, discussing skills of identification, observation and recording. But what I like the most about this article is its ending, a message of encouragement for the budding botanist: “May you become a keen observer, a careful recorder, and may you have exciting thoughts which lead to yet more discoveries!”. Perhaps we should follow in Eva’s footsteps here, and start looking a little closer at the plant species still making themselves known in the very fabric of the city. As Eva herself declares:

You too may be surprised to find just what is growing in some waste place, even in a built up area. One thing is certain: you will not know unless you look. (U DEC 1998/05/25/213)

Common groundsel (Senecio vulgaris) on High Street, July 2025 (photograph: author)

References

Mabey, R. 2012. Weeds: The Story of Outlaw Plants. London: Profile Books.

McArthur, J. 2015, ‘When the Fireweed Flowers’, Imperial War Museum, 16 June. Online at: https://www.iwm.org.uk/blog/research/2015/06/when-the-fireweed-flowers [Accessed 15 July 2025].