Plant Blindness

Over the past years, a lot has been written about plant blindness - described as the "inability to see or notice the plants in one’s own environment”. This tendency is so widespread that Elisabeth Schussler and James Wandersee, a pair of US botanists and biology educators, coined the term in 1998. Since that time, a huge body of work has been devoted to it and the results of all the studies clearly show that it is an issue we should be paying attention to.

For most of us, our mental images of animals are sharper than those of plants. Children recognize that animals are living creatures before they can tell that plants are also alive. Tests of recall also show that study participants remember pictures of animals better than images of plants. For instance, one US study tested “attentional blink” – the ability to notice one of two rapid-fire images – using pictures of plants, animals and unrelated objects. This showed that participants more accurately detected images of animals than plants. Our lives are defined by plants and they surround us on every turn and straight line of our lives, but we walk through them without recognition that they are there. Plant are simply a green backdrop to the meaningful part of our lives. This so-named plant blindness has serious repercussions in that it shows our general lack of interest in how plants play a role in our lives. It ties the hands of the few folks devoted to plant conservation issues, for one. Daily, we see media posts/articles/films on endangered species, but I can't remember one that focused on an endangered plant. As a society, we simply lack the attention span necessary to devote a conservation missive to a plant.

It also affects the way we view our landscapes. Plant blindness causes us to view plants basically as a placeholder in our yards. They are all basically inanimate objects to us that do pretty much the same thing. They beautify, but they do it pretty much equally. Substitute one plant for another and it matters little; we've still got "green" and we've eliminated bare space.

For most of my adult life, I've promoted diversity. The ever-pervasive plant blindness of our populace, however, means that my message often falls on deaf ears. In college, landscape architect students learn virtually nothing about plants themselves - only how to use them in sweeping patterns and in masses for maximum aesthetic interest. The ecology of the plant, the role it will play in the planted community being developed, is never a consideration other than perhaps the plants' needs for water and fertilizer. Gardening magazines promote this also in a way by showing us color without function; landscapes that will completely fall apart as soon as the camera people leave for a new assignment. They show us color, but not function as if plants were really nothing different than a good Monet painting. Even some of the folks who've recently come to realize that plants provide function seem to still be laboring under a sense of plant blindness that they simply can't shake yet. It's manifested in the idea that certain plants are "pollinator magnets" and the like and, thus, a sea of magnets is nothing less than what might be had in a real community of plants. Plants exist not as individuals in nature, but as parts of a functioning community. They should not be considered any different in a home landscape. 

Overcoming plant blindness might well lead to giving us an appreciation for the role each plant plays in our landscape and how these roles work together to form an ecologically functioning community.  I've worked hard here in my new landscape to create a living and functioning foundation for the rest of the living world. It is not the same landscape as someone else might plant, but that doesn't matter. The reality is that no two places in the natural world are identical either. That is not important. What matters is that the components of that landscape are working together to create a unique ecology and that the conditions created are nurturing the life that has come to depend on it.  There are no magic "plant magnets" that do this. It is done by committee, so to speak.  There are very few pieces for me to still add to what I've planted here since moving nearly 2 years ago. What I've got left to do is to develop more patience to let the pieces coalesce into the life-giving community that I have envisioned it will be.