This is a true crime story – but it isn’t what you think.
My mother was a thief. I’m not saying that to portray her badly – quite the opposite, in fact – but because that’s where this story begins.
In the early 2000s, my hometown in Australia, Canberra, was experiencing an incredible wave of new home construction. Many of these projects were located in designated areas, and were large-scale developments by major corporations. But there were also a huge number of homes constructed in a more decentralised manner: existing houses would be bought, enclosed behind fences, demolished, and a new house would then be built in its place – usually huge, and occupying the entire block.
Now, once the fences went up, there was no hope left for the house – or the garden. The bulldozers would destroy everything: brick, glass, paving, shrubs, trees. But in between the erection of the fences and the arrival of the bulldozers, my mother had her chance to strike. At least once per week she would drive out into the suburbs, armed with a shovel and some plastic bags. She would sneak through gaps in the fences, and begin digging. An hour or two later, she would return with new plants for the garden, that would be promptly replanted the following day. A true guerilla gardener!
What my mother did was illegal; I don’t deny that. But this crime story isn’t about what she did. This is about the actions of the developers. This is about the blatant and indiscriminate destruction of urban nature, simply because it was getting in the way. Was inconvenient. Was unwanted.
Now, this article is not about the legal status of trees and other plants.
This article is about addressing something different: the quiet, and often thoughtless, removal of vegetation from our urban spaces.
More than a decade ago, I left Australia: I lived in Italy, and the UK, and Argentina; I visited many countries and cities. I have had the privilege of seeing many other parts of the world, and observing how they work, and how they are responding to the environmental challenges that surround us. I have also been able to explore more deeply the role of urban nature in providing comfort and resilience to our streets.
Across the world, in different climates and cultures, urban nature is never really valued. It is treated as a pleasant ornament, a nice-to-have. The services offered by vegetation and nature are barely noticed, and rarely appreciated. Even in Paris, where the city government has pledged to plant 170,000 trees, old-growth plane trees have been felled to make way for the very green projects meant to replace them. If these trees were valued as lifeforms in their own right, it shouldn’t be possible to remove them so easily. As soon as a more important project emerges – which is, seemingly, anything – the urban nature is removed, discarded, destroyed. And we need to talk about this.
I now live in Copenhagen, ranked the world’s most liveable city in 2026 for the second year in a row, by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). And, despite that positive assessment, I recently witnessed the same disregard for urban nature here, too. In the same week as heatwaves swept across Europe, a small public space in central Copenhagen was stripped of its plantlife.
Trianglen sits in the neighbourhood of Østerbro, at the entrance of a large park called Fælledparken. It is characterised by a large traffic island, and Bien, a heritage-protected building from 1907, that previously served as a tram waiting area. Sharing the traffic island are a handful of shrubs and hedges. Or, perhaps I should say there were some plants there. As part of a project to restore and maintain Bien – a project I support – the entire island has been wrapped in fences, and the plants have been removed. Without ceremony, without notice. Simply gone. The irony is incredible: at the threshold to a major urban park, the only nature that is allowed to exist is that which lies within the boundaries of the park itself.
Earlier I used the word ‘thoughtless’ to describe the removal of plant life in urban spaces, and I think that word is important. The plants that are erased from our streets aren’t removed out of malice, or because they are disliked. They are removed because they have no intrinsic value of their own. And when something has no value, it can be removed without concern.
My mother pursued her criminal career for good reasons, and protected living organisms that would otherwise end up in landfill. Unfortunately there was nobody present to protect the plants at Trianglen. And this makes me wonder:
How often is nature removed, quietly and without fuss, from our urban spaces, and what are you willing to do about it?
References:
Ausloos, M. Heatwave in Paris exposes city's lack of trees. Reuters, August 2022.
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