Seeing Green: Why We Should All Be Paying Attention to Plants

Olivia Vandergriff, a protagonist of Richard Powers’s The Overstory, spends a semester living in a house in front of which grows a tree—“a living fossil, one of the oldest, strangest things that ever learned the secret of wood.” Yet Olivia doesn’t even know that the tree is there. Though she passes by it every day, she fails to notice its existence. The tree—unnamed in the novel—is the gingko biloba. And Olivia’s condition—undiagnosed in the chapter—is plant awareness disparity.

The ginkgo biloba, a sole survivor of an ancient group of trees that used to cover the earth, is now an endangered species. Meanwhile, plant awareness disparity (PAD)—which was previously known as plant blindness but renamed to avoid ableism—contributes largely to the widespread indifference to the threat of botanical extinction and a limited interest in plant conservation. PAD on a global scale is dangerous, but on a personal level, it is detrimental as it impoverishes our experience of the surrounding world. So much beauty, so much drama, so much wisdom we miss out on if we fail to connect with plants.

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If by now I’ve got you looking out of the window to check if there’s been a tree there that you haven’t noticed, that’s a good thing. And you shouldn’t blame yourself (too much) if it turns out there’s been a forest growing in your back garden that you didn’t know about.

Being able to see plants may not come to us naturally. According to James H. Wandersee and Elisabeth E. Schussler, two concerned botanists who coined the term “plant blindness” in 1998, several characteristics of human perception and visual cognition contribute to our surprising ability to overlook plants.

First of all, there’s inattentional blindness: not noticing something in our visual field because our attention is focused on something else. And because we tend to focus on familiar things, and people generally now know less about plants than animals, we can easily miss these green creatures. To fix this and turn inattention into attention, we need to assign meaning to the stimuli. Remember looking for the signs of spring on a school walk? Prompted by the teacher’s command, we were suddenly able to see budding snowdrops and primulas that we probably passed by earlier in the day. Seek plants, and ye shall find!

Secondly, the plants’ own inherent characteristics affect human visual and cognitive processes. The pervasive greenness of plants—when there are no flowers popping out in color, at least—means that they blend in with their surroundings, and what we end up seeing is a monochromatic green background. Plants don’t run or fly, and they tend to grow close together, further augmenting the “plants as backdrop” effect. And they are also usually not our enemies—with a few exceptions like Sosnowsky’s hogweed or poison ivy—therefore we can safely ignore them.

Even though poets like to compare their favorite people to flowers, and despite the fact that we share nearly 50 percent of our DNA with plants, they seem as different to us as can be. As the theory goes, humans tend to notice and care more about those species that are similar to them. This preference for biobehavioral similarity results in pronounced favoritism for fellow mammals, and in disregard for obscure or strange creatures like insects or spiders. Plants seem even further removed from us in their inability to move and their lack of a face. No wonder most conservation projects are “biased against plants and toward mammals and birds, particularly well-studied large-bodied mammal species with forward-facing eyes,” according to Mung Balding and Kathryn J.H. Williams from the University of Melbourne.

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Plant awareness disparity is a self-feeding loop: we have no interest in plants, so we can’t see them, and because we don’t see them, we can’t develop an interest in them. But it hasn’t always been this way.

Shakespeare’s verses are full of botanical references, and, given that his plays were written for ye average Londoner of the Elizabethan period, we can safely assume that the bard expected his audience to be familiar with “darnel, hemlock, and rank fumitory,” as well as nearly two hundred other common English plants. After all, late sixteenth-century London was a compact city of merely two hundred thousand souls, with nature available within a short walking distance. The meadows and woods surrounding the city were, for many, the best places to find cures for ailments—long before the National Health Service was founded—as well as forage for edibles. The basic botanic literacy was the literacy of the day.

These days, nature is much more removed from our lives, and this disconnection from nature, rather than cognitive bias, might be the main reason for plant blindness, according to some researchers. Frank M. Dugan from Washington State University, who attempted a comparison of Shakespeare’s audience’s botanical literacy with that of contemporary Londoners—finding the latter’s knowledge of plants considerably scanter—considers separation from nature and agriculture a key factor, along with a zoocentric education, and an unexciting method of teaching about plants. He writes, “The idea is that somehow, there must be a way that teachers can make fir trees or pampas grass as exciting as baby pandas.” Think Plants vs. Zombies, Marvel’s Groot, or “stimulant herbal plants” for starters.

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Sixteenth-century theatergoers did not study botany or use herbaria. For them, knowing plants—being able to identify and name them, recognizing their actual and contrived uses and symbolic meanings—was as natural as navigating social media is for us.

Plant lore is getting lost because, in the Anthropocene, we have re-imagined ourselves as separate from the nature, only requiring other species to serve us as natural resources. We fail to learn the names of plants, because we do not consider their importance. But denaming is more than just an act of ignorance, it is an exercise and expression of power that we—as a self-appointed superior species—believe to have over all the other genera.

“Talking about living beings as ‘natural resources’ lightens humans from the responsibility and reduces our environment to mere commodities,” writes Dario Dellino from the University of Bari. According to Dellino, plant blindness, far from being innocent obliviousness, is a manifestation of human arrogance and a sense of self-sufficiency. Yes, plants may be responsible for oxygenating the environment, making it possible for all other species, including humans, to live on Earth, but it’s so easy to forget that…

“There is no oxygen without plants. We cannot breathe without plants. So, you can sit in a corporate cubicle, in the air conditioning vents, and enjoy the mystery of plant photosynthesis somewhere far away from the place of these gloomy activities, just by breathing. You just need to know where you live. And how much you have from these green monster creatures, impossibly beautiful creatures of this planet,” Urszula Zajączkowska, botanist, poet, and professor at SGGW, reminds us.

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Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and while many of us would graciously acknowledge the splendor of a decorative flower bed or a formal garden, the spontaneous vegetation of plants in an urban setting is much less welcomed. Species of sturdy flora growing in pavement cracks, on roadsides, in gutters, and other places out of bounds demarcated by humans, are more often than not considered a nuisance, a sign of abandon, a symbol of neglect, and an indication of poor management. There is a derogatory term used to label such plants, vilifying them and stripping them of their identity. You might have heard it, or even used it. Weeds.

“Urban wild plants, growing where they are not wanted—that’s the definition of a weed,” explains Dr. Bethan Stagg from the University of Exeter. “Plants not having an identity is a very characteristic attribute of plant blindness…they’re just this anonymous, amorphous group called weeds, and people aren’t seeing them as individual species.” The negative attitude towards plants is reinforced by the idea of weeds as damaging to built infrastructure. Just consider the common idiom “to weed out,” which is applicable both to unwanted things and people…

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In our human-centered world, plants are often denied their identity, but this speciesism goes further. In one of my favorite animated films from Studio Ghibli, Only Yesterday by Isao Takahata, a twenty-seven-year-old Taeko travels from Tokyo, where she has lived all her life, to a village in Yamagata in northern Japan. Picking her up from the station is her distant relative, Toshio. While driving, he shares with Taeko his motivation for a career switch to organic farming: “I think I can do my best in agriculture, ’cause it’s so interesting to raise living things,” he says, to which Taeko replies, “You…raise livestock?”

Startled, Toshio clarifies, “Huh? No, that’s not what I meant. I do have cows and chickens, but I don’t mean livestock. Hey, look there…rice, as well as apples and cherries, they’re all living things.”

Taeko is clearly surprised by this realization. She needed someone to tell her that plants are living creatures. Perhaps we all do. According to a study cited in the article by Balding and Williams, a child’s idea of the natural world is very anthropocentric to begin with, and they struggle with the notion of plants being alive. They usually overcome this likely innate bias, and by the age of ten “most children have expanded their notion of living things from people to animals and finally, plants.”

When it comes to plant awareness deficit, nature must be overcome by nurture, but as species, we are increasingly less inclined to consider the importance of planting the seeds of botanical knowledge in the minds of the future generations. And perhaps it is through art and stories that we can find our way back to the lost garden of paradise, and reconnect with the green creatures that provide us with unconditional and unending nurture, whether we acknowledge that or not.

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Tina Gianquito teaches literature at Colorado School of Mines and collects plant-oriented stories for Herbaria 3.0: a digital environmental humanities project. As part of the Literature and Environment course, her students—future petroleum engineers—are required to write a story about a plant that is important to them. Initially, there is usually much skepticism (“There’s no plant in my life”), but it is a mandatory assignment. “In the end, all students come away with the realization that these stories were always in the background, and thinking about a particular plant connected them in very substantial ways to past memories, and opened up a new experience,” says Gianquito.

Relegating plants to memory props is a huge disservice to species that sustain us, but for those of us affected by severe plant awareness disparity, it’s a good start. “When you think of it, it might be a bit problematic that the relationship is always from a human perspective, but that’s how we see the world. It’s a necessary first step,” says Gianquito.

If, like me, you have grown up listening to and reading tales by Hans Christian Andersen, there’s a high chance that you anthropomorphize plants. Looking at the wild plants competing for space in the green belt outside my home, I can’t help but imagine the role they play in a society of plants that is a close reflection of our human society, and I project my feelings and dreams on the fir trees and wild daisies—just like in Andersen’s stories.

Anthropomorphizing plants could lead to developing empathy for flora. But plant studies scholars and post-humanists are increasingly more apprehensive of this approach. Perhaps it’s time we de-center the human and radically re-evaluate the value of plants, moving away from the reductive, utilitarian, and anthropocentric perspective deeply ingrained in Western philosophical and cultural traditions. We should see the plants for what they are, not for what they are to us.

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“The more I base myself in the depths of the laboratory, the better I know that trying to explain the life of plants—creatures so different from us—by using only hard numbers and rigid functions, is always a painful confrontation with the impotence of this method,” writes Urszula Zajączkowska. As a scientist, she researches the growth, anatomy, aerodynamics, and biomechanics of plants. As an artist, she translates plant movements into ballet, poetry, and mixed-media art.

Dawn Sanders from the University of Gothenburg works across the art/science interface to create new “attentional frames in teaching and learning contexts towards plants.” Collaborating on environmental art projects at the Gothenburg Botanical Garden, she found out that “art creates spaces where contact is possible, and humans can become more intimate with plants.”

An exhibition of large-scale portraits of seeds by artists Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson was part of Beyond Plant Blindness—the art/science project co-authored by Sanders, who said: “These seed portraits, and accompanying micro-stories, are really good catalysts for bringing in curiosity.” And curiosity might be the best interspecies connector, allowing us to get to know plants and recognize their beauty beyond the conventional aesthetics of flowers.

“Plants are so unlike people that it’s very difficult for us to appreciate fully their complexity and sophistication,” writes Michael Pollan, the author of The Botany of Desire. But it’s worth trying. Looking at plants and seeing them for what they truly are is like stepping into another realm or expanding our universe into another dimension: the green dimension.

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This excerpt was also published in Przekrój, a Polish magazine for intellectual and spiritual seekers that launched an English-language version for American readers. Founded in 1945 at the beginning of the Cold War, Przekrój (pronounced “p-SHEH-crooy”) served as a cultural lifeline for millions and continues the same mission today as a thought-provoking publication focused on the art of living.