I learned a hard lesson recently. It happened when a 3-year-old wet meadow and shrub area Id designed was accidentally mowed by a brush hog operator one afternoon in early July.

Tractor tires wreaked havoc on one-third acre of native warm-season grasses and sedges and flowering plants along the wetland edge. The brush hog chewed up about 40 young native shrubs, which looked like woody upstarts. (No mounds of mulch surrounded them.) The planting was almost three years old.

The operators explanation was simple and almost predictable: He saw a tall field, he had some time left after his primary mowing job on the same property. The operator thought hed do the owner a favor.

To his eye, he said, it looked like a bunch of weeds. No matter that to the birds, butterflies, bees, reptiles, and amphibians, it looked like a grocery store and a nursery for the next generation. That wasnt on his mind.

We could label the loss the result of incompetence, carelessness, a terrible mistake, or worse. Nothing could undo the damage, especially the years it had taken for the plants to mature.

Yet we all know that the tractor operator made a common assumption that earns him and thousands of others a paycheck: Tall vegetation is supposed to be mowed. It blocks peoples views. It triggers complaints about messiness. Mow it. Its always been that way.

But the mowers attitude may also be a result of a broader cultural problem, one that some in the horticulture world called plant blindness.

The phrase appeared for the first time in a 1998 guest editorial paper by science educators James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler. They defined plant blindness as the inability to see or notice the plants in ones own environment.

They observed multiple consequences from this bias, such as the inability to recognize the importance of plants in human affairs and natural processes, and the misguided, anthropocentric ranking of plants as inferior to animals, leading to the erroneous conclusion that they are unworthy of human consideration.

(Read more in their guest editorial in The American Biology Teacher Volume 61, Issue 2, available at online.ucpress.edu/abt.)

This perspective is nothing new in the 21st century, of course. It dates at least to the beginning of the 20th century when our recent ancestors abandoned farms in droves. Or, perhaps it dates from the more distant times when we no longer needed to be able to distinguish edible from poisonous plants or find fibers for homespun clothing or find medicine. We lost our need to see plants.

Unfortunately, our mental wiring may be part of the problem as well. Plants seem to be inanimate and easy to control. Wandersee observed that the primary problem might be due to the inherent constraints of [our] visual information processing systems. Animals are more noticeable. Were more likely to understand the consequences of animal encounters, both positive and negative.

This inability to see plants may have tragic future consequences, however.

Paradoxically, plants form the basis of most animal habitats and all life on earth, observed Wandersee and Schussler in 1999. More recently, Douglas Tallamy, author of Natures Best Hope and other works that alerts us to the insect apocalypse, summarized the profound role of plants in eight words: Plants, in essence, enable animals to eat sunlight, he says. Insects are the animals that are best at transferring energy from plants to other animals.

Can we afford to be plant-blind any longer?

Taking off the blinders

It would be nice to imagine the tractor operator, given the same encounter with a wet meadow, might pause and think: Thats a bird and pollinator habitat that doubles as wetland protection. Id better check with someone before I mow. This change of perspective is unlikely, however, without some new intentions on his part and a bit of education.

Here are a few ideas to help you and those you know overcome plant blindness.

First, check out this entertaining video essay by U.K.-based YouTuber Benedict Furness: bit.ly/plant-blindness.

For more fun, download an app called Picture This, available at picturethisai.com. Heres how it works: I was walking in a grassy field recently when I encountered an unusual plant. I snapped a picture with Picture This. The app, which is based on artificial intelligence, identified a green-fringed bog orchid in about two seconds. I have found it to be about 80 percent accurate, far more than other plant identification apps Ive tried.

If you enjoy crowd-sourced information, one of the most reliable and most popular sites is iNaturalist, available at inaturalist.org. Upload your photos and receive help from scientists, citizen-scientists, students of all ages, and the rest of us.

iNaturalist offers both plant and animal identification. It is a joint initiative by theCalifornia Academy of Sciencesand theNational Geographic Society.

If youre a Facebook user, the Plant Identification group (bit.ly/Facebook-plant-ID) helps with all sorts of plants, including houseplants and edibles.

If you want to know more about plant blindness, the Native Plant Conservation Campaign has more information at bit.ly/plant-blindness-page.

Above all, the next time you see a grassy meadow, chalk one up for pollinator and bird habitat. Make sure the mower stays in the shed.

Kathy Connolly is a landscape designer from Old Saybrook who writes and speaks about horticulture and ecology. Reach her through her website, speakingoflandscapes.com.

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Green and Growing: Plant blindness, a mower, and one unfortunate afternoon - theday.com