Peter Del Tredici

Peter Del Tredici is a renowned botanist and horticulturist who worked at Harvard University, contributing extensively to the Arnold Arboretum in Boston and Harvard Forest. He is celebrated for his particular knowledge he developed of wild urban plants that thrive in the patchy, vacant spaces of East Coast cities—from Montreal to Detroit—and for highlighting their ability to coinhabit "novel ecosystems" shaped by human activity.

Del Tredici’s argument is that these spontaneous plants are “de facto native urban flora” considering the novel conditions produced by humans. It is an argument against perceiving spontaneous vegetation including invasive, non-native plants and plants considered as weeds, to be less worthy. Labelling a plant “invasive” or “weed”, says Del Tredici, gives people the licence to blame it for ruining the environment and to get rid of it.

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