On the banks of the River Don in Sheffield, within sight of the vast Meadowhall shopping centre, grow some highly exotic specimens – wild Mediterranean fig trees.
In the days of heavy industry, fig biscuits were a favourite local delicacy. After they were eaten, the fig seeds passed through people’s digestive systems and ended up discharged as sewage into streams and rivers. When Sheffield was the centre of a great steel-making industry on the banks of the Don, the factories used its water to cool the hot metal and then dumped the waste warm water back into the river.
For the fig seeds, this would have seemed like being back in the Mediterranean, and they germinated and thrived in the warm waters. The trees grew into quite large specimens bearing fruit, and some of those trees are now thought to be over 70 years old.
And so the wild fig trees of Sheffield became an emblem of the city’s industrial heritage, and after a campaign by local people including botanists and ecologists at the University of Sheffield, the figs were given protected species status, making them the only protected alien plant species in Britain.
