Plant Blindness | Hacker News Reader

Plant Blindness

en.wikipedia.org

61 pointsdynm29 comments

Curiously, my wife and I tried to 'cure ourselves' a few years back. We bought field guides, studied classes of wild grasses and such that might be common in the midwest. Then we went out over our 80 acres of fallow ground and tried to identify everything we could.

We came up with four (4) different plants. The brome grass we'd planted as a cover crop, Queen Anne's Lace, ground cherries and the occasional thistle. That was it.

Now, we may still have been 'plant blind' and not capable of recognizing or even seeing anything else. Or, 80 years of monoculture followed by 5 years of letting it go fallow weren't enough to permit much else to grow yet. I don't know.

Have you considered seeding some of the land with native species? My summer job in college was doing wetland and prairie restorations. It is very rewarding to visit old project sites to see species that I planted still growing years later and birds and other animals that have returned to what was once an empty field. Many species can be introduced simply by hand casting seed on the ground. If you want to cover a larger area, you can use an "organ grinder" type device that sits on your chest and is powered by a hand crank.

(One of the sites I helped restore was old Meigs Field of Flight Simulator fame, now Northerly Island Park in Chicago. It has been reworked at least once since though, so I don't know if any of my plants remain.)

My county conservation district has a great native plant program. They have an annual native plant sale with amazing prices. I am picking up an order of 25 mock orange this weekend that I paid $10 for. They also do a 3 week, 3 lecture and fieldtrip course for $25 geared towards sustainable native landscaping.

We had a similar assignment in elementary school and for some reason the memory of teacher being surprised with the small number of species we found on the grass around school is still in my mind 15+ years.

I was so convinced there was nothing there (around 5 different species) and teacher kept grunting in disbelief.

Cultivating native species, once they have been eliminated, is actually very time consuming. Cover crops, invasive species, and depleted soil (if it was farmed) all contribute to conditions that favor bad plants over good.

Fallow doesn't equal native prairie or woodlands. Fallow just equals empty. You really have to work a lot at it to be able to foster a native habitat, for a few years, then it mostly takes care of itself.

Source; farming, self-sustaining landscapes, and harvesting local flora and fauna has been my hobby for 3 decades or so.

Yes that sounds about right. It takes multiple decades for some semblance of diversity to return to plowed fields. And it will never be the same as before. The soil biodiversity itself is massively degraded. You can speed up the restoration very significantly, assuming that is your plan, by doing mass native plantings and seeding. If you can introduce biochar before or as part of the process the soil biome will also recover much faster.

Many resources online for all of this.

Planted native nut trees and some pine. Seeded some switch grass but it didn't do well. Will burn this summer.

That sounds hard to believe and kinda sad if true.

Slightly off topic: Growing up I never valued outside spaces. I never spent time in nature. In my 30s, and now living outside of a city, I walk every day and try to make it through a forest of wooded area. It really calms anxiety over the past year. When I move home in the next few years, proximity of nature will be a key point in picking a new home.

Not really off topic, I think it is very pertinent.

I am curious - what was your childhood like? Do your parents value outside places? Did your parents take you outside to enjoy nature? Do you have any memories of your mom or dad taking in a big deep breath outside and going, "Gee it sure is nice today!"

I ask because I have absolutely zero memories of this and it wasn't until I moved to the midwest and became surrounded by a culture of people who value good weather and sunshine and summertime that I became more in-tune with it. I also grew up in LA where we tend to take this stuff for granted, so there's that too.

I have no nice memories of going outside as a kid. I was a shy kid and was always more comfortable inside. I think I had to learn that being outside on my own terms was actually good and had value.

I've really enjoyed the In Defense of Plants podcast and blog as a way of learning more about plants and ecology.

https://www.indefenseofplants.com/podcast

And of course CPBBD https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3CBOpT2-NRvoc2ecFMDCsA

I would posit this is merely one of the many presentations of not being present and mindful in your environment. The same could be said for a lot of things, not just plants.

A fun way to play with mindfulness in the urban world is to try and spot Thomssons. These are parts of buildings or pieces of infrastructure that are relics of a past use. A good example is a door that's too high to access, because there's no longer a staircase to it. That's an easy one, but also find things like inaccessible mailboxes, railings for no reason, utility poles with no utilities.

It's fun because it gets you paying attention to buildings you pass by every day, and you also get to think about the world around you in the context of the bigger time picture it is all part of. We can sometimes forget that things around us have often existed for longer than we've each existed.

> Thomssons

What is the origin of this term? I can't find anything with Google.

It was coined by Akesegawa Genpai, in his 1985 book Hyperart: Thomassons. He got the name from an American baseball player Gary Thomasson, who was traded to the Yomiuri Giants where he ended up on the bench for a lot of the season. The general concept behind a Thomasson is that it is useless but still maintained, and so it's a sort of mean analogy based on Gary's bad season.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/thomassons/

Ah, the spelling was wrong. Thanks, I'm going to keep my eye out for Thomassons in my area.

Ah heck, my apologies! Sorry for sending you on a wild goose chase.

I worked for the forest service right after college, which meant spending a lot of time outside of urban areas. I remember always noticing how impoverished Seattle seemed when I went into town. Then, after a few weeks in Seattle, I adjusted and didn't notice how few species there were.

I really wish more people had a sense of what we are losing, what we will never be able to give to our children, because it is gone forever.

I love plants, and I pay attention to species, tree shapes, etc. I constantly talk to kids about plants and ask them to identify the species, and pay attention to their features. I think it's really important and it tunes them to the world around.

Yeah. Another one is that people are often blind to what’s going on with the birds too.

A while back I trained myself to observe plants, birds, etc.

There will be stuff going on like a hawk swooping in to kill a bird and nobody even notices but me, just because my brain is sort of cued in to notice those things. There’s a nest with several hawks, and also a little falcon that hunts rodents about 3x per day, both right next to my house in neighboring yards but I never even noticed them before this.

It’s all about what you train your brain to notice, and once you start, you start to see it everywhere. If plants or animals are salient to you, you’ll notice them. If not, you won’t.

I think I have the opposite of this. I grew up on a bush lot, and my father used to look up and point out different species of plants.

When I'm outside that general geographical area I always find it unsettling that I can't recognize the plants.

The PictureThis AI app has really helped me better understand some plants around me and ones I find in nature. I find it more immediately gratifying than looking things up in books etc. Plus it helps diagnose issues which are not apparent to someone without a green thumb

Just got a meme from a friend:

"Earth: has 60,065 different tree species"

"Minecraft:"

Doc Ock from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

"There's five, actually"

This seems like an attempt by botanists to medicalize a lack of interest in their hobby.

I would hope that the medicalization is somewhat ironic, but it's hard to tell. Anyway, interest in plants isn't just a hobby. Our alienation from nature maybe has something to do with why it's so easy for a lot of people to be comfortable with poisoning the environment.

Reducing botany to 'a hobby' status is definitely not understanding how important is this science for our interests. The applications of botany in medicine, sociology, or engineering, for example, are countless.

Or to describe yet another trait of domestication syndrome in humans.

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