plantanarchy:

wish I could spend more time on the river just existing. this a natural landscape so completely modified by human activity and industrialization to the point of complete lack of familiarity but you see the parts that survive and thrive anyway. lots of wet feet natives beating out the invasives anyway. this part of the river was a popular dredging site for sand and gravel. this island was owned by a gravel company for a long time and Pittsburgh’s post-industrial landscape leaves holes for tangling vines to strangle trees and crumbling buildings and the roadsides are a mess of concrete and stubborn nature. the river banks are mostly Japanese knotweed that if allowed forms a bamboo like forest of dense foliage and down island there are massive hedges of rose of sharon but also… Lobelia cardinalis blooms in little sprays of red. Sycamore trees and fringe trees and eastern cottonwoods and catalpa and button bush hug the banks and grow wild. It’s a big mix of native and non-native, a “natural” landscape shaped by locks and dams and barges and nature’s still trying to take it back