03.2020 | THE SCIENTIST 13moves more water up the tubes to replace
it. A forest tree emits a chorus of ultrasonic
pops and cracks as the tension within the
tubes occasionally tears the water mole-
cules apart, spontaneously giving birth to
a pocket of steam deep within the trunk.
Compared to the bird’s air-cooled,
supercharged engine, the plant’s trick
for moving fluid is elegant, microscopic,
and altogether more subtle. But it is over-
whelmingly majestic. Almost every plant,
from pavement-crack daisies to giant
redwoods, is doing it; it’s just something
that normally escapes our notice. Plant
blindness has worrying practical effects in
terms of funding opportunities, research
investments, and conservation policy.
But I consider its saddest effect to be the
missed opportunities for calming consid-
eration and quiet admiration.
Humans haven’t historically con-
cerned themselves daily with diffuse
issues such as global conservation strat-
e g y, or esoteric issues such as equity in
science funding. But even old Aristotle
recognized that we are constantly con-
cerned with our own more-immediate
anxieties, stress, and listlessness. Turn-
ing plants—objects of serene beauty,
complexity, calm, and ubiquity—into
focal points for familiarity and fascina-
tion is a salve that can serve us in almost
any place at any time.
These days, there are many blog
posts and podcast episodes that address
and attempt to heal plant blindness.
Education on the psychological, eco-
logical, and philosophical benefits of
plants is ke y. This is a point of univer-
sal agreement among plant enlighteners.
And no one is better placed to appreci-
ate this than Regis University’s Cathe-
rine Kleier, whose enthusiasm for plants
has infected many via her popular lec-
ture series on Audible.
Kleier told me that an important first
step in acquainting oneself with plants
is similar to meeting people: you have
to learn their names. Not the full Latin
name of every last species. Knowing a
few family names will suffice. “Just to be
able to s ay, ‘That’s an aster,’ or to tell a fir
from a pine. They become like someone
you recognize.” Asked what her students
are most struck b y, Kleier answers that
most of them simply “never realized how
much plants actually do.”
What plants do is grow, survive, travel,
reproduce, and navigate social struggles.
These activities are, incidentally, the epi-
sode headings of David Attenborough’s
1995 documentary The Private Life of
Plants, beloved by botanists for its use
of time lapse videography to show plants
doing: the explosion of feathery samaras
from the head of a dandelion, the snaking
vine feeling its way up a doomed victim’s
trunk, the technicolor wave of a decidu-
ous forest’s traffic-light progression from
green to yellow to red in autumn. The
scenes focus mostly on plants that explode,
wilt, catch flies, or otherwise move like an
animal. Or the videographers document
pollination and seed dispersal so that the
subject becomes the bat doing the polli-
nating or the ostrich carrying the seed. In
a ploy to capture the attention of a broader
audience, the plants are made to be more
exciting, more striking, and in a w ay, they
are animalized.But excitement and observable dyna-
mism aren’t qualities plants excel at
above other things—it’s those subtle and
sober qualities. The plant-enlightened
aren’t disappointed that plants are effec-
tively immobile at normal human time-
scales—on the contrary, we like it that
w ay. Strangely, documentaries showing
moments of animal glory do the opposite,
and freeze the breaching whale in time
with droplets of water shed by its fins sus-
pended in elegant arcs. We’re intrigued
by the intimate detail obscured by move-
ment. Plants save us the trouble of needing
modern film equipment to achieve it.
Addressing plant blindness has typi-
cally been driven by botanists, but even
as a plant scientist, I am delighted tosee this changing. The benefits of plant
appreciation extend far beyond the
geeky complexities and global concerns
that scientists are—rightly—prone to
emphasize. The University of Adelaide’s
Laura Ruggles has written extensively on
plant blindness, and describes a healthy
human-plant relationship as an “anchor”
that moors humans in their surround-
ings. Ruggles is a philosopher whose
essays shed a revelatory light on plants
by weaving together the spreadsheets-
and-scatterplots work of empirical sci-
entists with concepts that people tradi-
tionally think of as animal-esque, such
as behavior and consciousness. She and
Kleier both emphasize the role of men-
torship in spreading plant awareness,
and Ruggles’s many examples stretch
beyond the lecture hall or the exposi-
tory documentary. She points to urban
gardening groups, hipster art blogs,
photography meetups, short story com-
pilations, and even Twitter’s #wildflow-
erhour (trending every Sunday night
at 8:00 PM GMT). These expressions
of plant appreciation suggest that the
serenity of contemplating bark and
chlorophyll really does exert a welcome
pull on people’s orbits through a frenetic
modern world. Struggling in a tangle of
countless appointments and emails, we
can respire slowly and let our minds drift
beneath the buildings and pavements,
where the roots of trees that began life
before there was a city penetrate the
earth below its foundations. The roots
still pull groundwater up their trunks,
toward the leaves they built last year
from condensed atmospheric gas, some
of which we ourselves exhaled. And after
so many centur ies they are still holding
that column of water erect until it evapo-
rates to make clouds, and then rain.Many thanks to Catherine Kleier and
Laura Ruggles for their time and insights.M. Timothy Rabanus-Wallace is an agri-
cultural geneticist from South Australia,
currently working at the Leibniz Institute
of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research
in Gaterseleben, Germany.Plant blindness describes the
tendency of people to simply
edit plants out of their daily
observations.