- The Guardian, Thursday 11 September 2008
In 2006, the Environment Agency published a poll of its top 100 eco-heroes of all time. Next to Charles Darwin was the name of Tony Bradshaw, a pioneer of restoration ecology, who has died aged 82. That juxtaposition was stunningly appropriate, for Tony made his name as an evolutionary biologist. His work on the evolution of tolerance to heavy metals in plants growing in contaminated soils remains the clearest and best example of evolution in action, and Darwin would have applauded it.
Where Tony left his academic colleagues in the shade was by applying that brilliant, fundamental research to the restoration of vegetation and functioning ecosystems to derelict land, first on mine sites in Wales and later in his adopted city of Liverpool and world-wide. His ability to move seamlessly between the worlds of fundamental and applied science may now be more common, but in the 1960s and 70s was unusual and even disdained by some.
The son of an architect, Tony was born in Kew, Surrey, and was interested in plants from an early age. As a 13-year-old at the outbreak of the second world war, he dug for victory - literally. The entire front garden of the family house was turned over to vegetables under his care, despite being on heavy clay. Perhaps that experience seeded his lifelong interest in making soil in unlikely places.
After graduating in botany at Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1947, he moved to the University College of Wales, first as a research student in Aberystwyth and then as a lecturer at Bangor. His work on metal tolerance was outstanding. He demonstrated the power of natural selection to bring about rapid evolutionary changes in natural grasses, even when the populations were separated by only very short distances, which conventional theory at the time regarded as impossible because gene flow between the populations was thought to swamp the disruptive effects of selection. Consequently, locally adapted races could evolve easily.
Tony quickly saw the potential of this discovery to help restore polluted soils. In 1968 he took the chair of botany at Liverpool University, and the range of degraded environments covered by his lab expanded quickly. Spoil heaps from coal, slate and china clay mines, limestone quarries, metal wastes, the bare margins of reservoirs and urban dereliction all fell under his gaze.
The key to his work was creating soil on these damaged sites without resorting to the then standard technique of importing topsoil at great expense (and at great damage to the source of the soil). Consequently, huge areas of land could be restored to health because the costs of doing so were so low. His work on the revegetation of china clay tips in Cornwall formed the basis of the techniques behind the Eden Project.
His international reputation grew quickly, but he never lost touch with his team's research. Even when head of a large department, he would happily spend a day on site with a research student, spade in hand and inspiration flowing. In 1982 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, and other honours followed, including the presidency of the British Ecological Society, of which he was made an honorary member in 1988.
Tony was involved with many environmental organisations, including the first Groundwork Trust, set up in St Helens, Merseyside, in 1981 as a partnership between the then Countryside Commission and local authorities to work with the community to bring about environmental change and the consequent social and economic benefits.
The model was so successful that there are now more than 50 Groundwork Trusts in the UK, focused on communities where environmental dereliction goes hand-in-hand with social and economic deprivation, and has been replicated worldwide. In Britain, the movement has given rise to the Land Restoration Trust.
Many other bodies were given his generous support, ranging from the Merseyside Environmental Trust (of which he was the founding chairman and later president) to the National Urban Forestry Unit, the National Wildflower Centre (again, he was its founding chair) and the Eden Project. He helped set up the Institute for Ecology and Environmental Management, a professional body for ecologists, and was its first president. He was awarded its gold medal last year.
He published more than 250 works, not just in mainstream scientific journals. His book The Restoration of Land (1980), written jointly with Mike Chadwick, was the standard text on the subject, mixing science and practice fluently, and Trees in the Urban Landscape (1995) set the same standards for those much abused "friends of the city".
Tony's greatest legacy, however, is in the people he inspired. He was an outstanding teacher with a rare combination of clarity and enthusiasm. He supervised more than 60 postgraduate research students from all over the world, most of whom have continued in research and related posts. He was an exceptionally gifted supervisor, knowing exactly when to intervene and when to let a student have free rein, and his students learned from him that research could simultaneously be scientifically rigorous, socially valuable and great fun.
Tony married Betty Alliston in 1955, and they had three daughters, Jane, Penny and Sarah. When Betty died in 2000, Tony stayed in Liverpool and continued to devote his knowledge and experience to the city, and helped transform its oldest public park, St James Gardens. Shortly before he died, he was made Liverpool's first citizen of honour.
· Anthony David Bradshaw, evolutionary biologist and restoration ecologist, born January 17 1926; died August 21 2008
