Colonial cities have remarkable similarities in their urban biotopes and landscape designs. The similar urban planning principles, landscape architectural styles, urban construction, and planting designs have produced an array of urban habitats that are replicated around the globe. From urban lawns to hedges and vegetation in pavement cracks, compositional similarity in urban biotopes is probably not surprising. But now, new concepts in individual planting design language such as "plant signatures", "go wild" and "alternative" or "freedom lawns" in North America, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand are producing a new ecological and cultural identity.