Cryptoforestry with the luftwaffe

London Garden in bomb crater 1943

"Many city children of my generation got their first experience of nature courtesy of the Luftwaffe, when bombed-out houses were transformed into little wildernesses of thistle, teasel, willowherb and loosestrife. Redstarts and other birds nested in crannies in the ruins, among staircases leading to nowhere, peeling wallpaper and upper-storey fireplaces, still with ashes in the grate, now open to the sky. The bomb sites, where I yearned in vain to be allowed to play, appeared to me to be immemorial landscape features, full of character and mystery, and one of the major attractions of family visits to London, Liverpool and Birkenhead in the late 1940s and early 1950s." - Jonathan Raban (source, earlier, wikipedia)