Every day, we’re surrounded by tens if not hundreds of species of plants. Plants that we eat - the fruits, vegetables and cereals that make up most of a healthy diet. Plants that we brush past, sit on, take shelter under, that give us shade or feed the birds we’re watching, or the bees. Even in the most urbanised areas, daisies and spurges squeeze their roots beneath the cracks in concrete pavement, ferns flourish on damp retaining walls. But despite this ubiquity of plants, or perhaps because of it, few people in western cultures can name the different plants that they see every day, or even see the differences between them.
The inability of most people to tell many plant species apart, even the plants that most folk see every day, is known as “plant blindness”, or the lack of plant awareness. For many people, essentially, plants are just a vague green background that their brains are used to filtering out. I still remember an early field class where our teacher asked us to look out at a sports field in northern Sydney and name how many different plant species we could see. To most people that field would just be “grass”: to an informed botanical eye it was a patchwork mosaic of annual grasses, exotic daisies, clover and creeping herbs, growing over and in between the perennial couch that had been planted for folk to kick balls over.
Plant blindness limits people’s ability to see the diversity of plant species in front of them every day. By extension, plant blindness limits people’s understanding of and care for different plant species – as a civil engineer once put to me, who cares about the scraggly little shrub that “looks like a weed from my backyard”? (Regardless of the fact that it was actually a rediscovered extinct species). No-one, perhaps, if they can’t see the difference.
But all is not hopeless. Plant blindness can be “cured”, more or less, through botanical education – by learning to notice, bit by bit, the plants around you. Learning plants is a little like learning a language. There’s a lot of memorisation at the start, the new vocabulary of leaf shapes and hair types, family and genus and species names and features. It can definitely be a bit bewildering at first, with over 20,000 species of native plants in Australia alone, not to mention all the exotic plants in parks and gardens. Once you get past the beginner’s crunch of so-much-to-memorise, though, you start to see the general patterns or “grammar” connecting everything - the basic structure of every flower or fern, the woody capsules or needle-like branchlets that unite all the plants of a particular family.
Learning a new language like plants is always easier with a good teacher. I’ve been lucky to have many excellent botanical teachers over the years – bush regenerators and botanists, gardeners and plant ecologists who have shared their plant knowledge with me through workshops and bushwalks, on iNaturalist or the Volunteer Botanical Training Program. And, of course, my PhD supervisors, who among other things taught me to see plants as more than just individual species, to see plants as an extended family, connected by their evolutionary lineages.
Next week I’ll be helping to teach Advanced Plant Identification at UNSW, passing on what I’ve learned to the next cohort of plant-speakers. Even as my work and research moves beyond botany, into the birds and bats that fly between those branches, it is satisfying to share this language of plants. Plants are so foundational to our ecosystems, I like to imagine that every other species is listening in on their language too.