Editorial Postscript: The naming of strangers in the landscape

Chestnut blight and mitten crabs from China, phylloxera from the eastern United States, musk rats from North America, gypsy moths from Eurasia, Canadian water weed and Colorado beetles. These are just some of the exotic biota, great and small, whose transatlantic histories the British animal ecologist, Charles Elton, related in his seminal text, The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants (Elton, 2000 (orig. 1958)). Despite earlier studies of the transformation of New Zealand’s life forms and landscape through the transplantation of Eurasian non-natives (Clark, 1949; Guthrie-Smith, 1921), Elton is the first scholar with whom the subject of species transfer and biotic intermixing is readily associated. Elton’s book is remembered, not least, as a classic early warning of the deleterious consequences of certain exotics that launched the study of bio-invasion. Elton recalled that his interest in foreign flora and fauna was sparked during his boyhood in the bustling, cosmopolitan seaport of Liverpool before the First World War. Continuing the grand tradition of exotic introductions established by imperial Greeks and Romans (related here by Hughes (2003) and McNeill (2003))—if on a more modest and informal scale—sailors from around the world brought a wealth of faunal curiosities to the city. One of Elton’s favourite haunts was a shop in which these strange and wonderful living exotica were displayed (Elton, 1955). My own emerging preoccupation with what the botanical historian Edgar Anderson has called the ‘transported landscape’ (Anderson, 1967, p. 9) can perhaps also be traced to my boyhood in this area. Growing up in the days when nobody worried about children roaming the woods alone all day, I explored the same seashore and dunes blanketed in sand-stabilizing Corsican pine that Elton had tramped half a century earlier. More relevant to the contents of this special issue of Landscape Research, however, are the creatures I encountered on the Lancashire coast just north of Liverpool. Formby Point, now a National Trust nature reserve, is one of the last English strongholds of the native red squirrel, a national icon (thanks to Beatrice Potter’s tale of Squirrel Nutkin) whose status is as embattled as that of its Italian counterpart. These various essays span transported landscapes and their non-human denizens from the Classical world to Germany and South Africa in the 1930s. As my co-editor has pointed out, many introductions were uncontroversial and the acquisition of floral and faunal citizenship was an effortless process (see Kjaergaard’s account of clover’s benign conquest of Europe (Kjaergaard, 2003)).

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