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].