Standing in the shadows of plants

This special issue of Plants, People, Planet brings together a wide range of perspectives on the topic of “plant blindness”—the widest to date in one issue—with contributions from scholars working across a diverse range of disciplines, from the humanities and social sciences to plant science, conservation, and ecology. We also take this opportunity to showcase the work of visual artists working at the interface of art and plant science, and educators who use plants as a key subject in their education practice. The geographical reach of the contributions is also extensive with contributions from around the globe and the Twittersphere. “Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass” Andrew Marvell, 1681 Plants permeate human life. Our physical and cultural environments are infused with the lives of plants. Even the oxygen in the air we breathe is the result of their biological processes. Indeed, “we rely on plants for food, shelter, fuel, and fibers for clothing, as well as for our gardens, landscape, and artistic inspiration” (Hiscock, Wilkin, Lennon, & Young, 2019). And yet, many of us struggle to even notice their existence, a phenomenon described as “plant blindness” (Halpin & Mckim, 2019; Wandersee & Schussler, 1999; 2001a). In the late twentieth century, two American biologist educators, Wandersee and Schussler, provoked an important debate with their theory of “plant blindness”. Twenty years on, further work is required on the challenges they set society (Balding & Williams, 2016; Ro, 2019). For instance, in the face of climate change, diminishing biodiversity and increasing extinction (IPBES Global Assessment Report, 2019), humans need not only to notice plants in their daily lives, but also to engage more deeply with understanding their “plantiness—the set of characteristics and capacities specific to plants” (Fleming, 2017, p. 27). This special issue of Plants, People, Planet brings together a wide range of perspectives on the topic of “plant blindness”—the widest to date in one issue—with contributions from scholars working across a diverse range of disciplines, from the humanities and social sciences to plant science, conservation, and ecology. We also take this opportunity to showcase the work of visual artists working at the interface of art and plant science, and educators who use plants as a key subject in their education practice. The geographical reach of the contributions is also extensive with contributions from around the globe and the Twittersphere! We acknowledge that even the much-used term “plant blindness” can, in itself, be considered to be problematic in that it equates the non-visibility of plants to the multifaceted state of being blind, albeit its original use by Wandersee and Schussler was considered to be metaphorical (Wandersee & Schussler, 1999; 2001a). Consequently, the term can be construed to function as a deficit model and possibly perceived as ableist (MacKenzie & Kuebbing et al., 2019; in this issue, pp. 139). Furthermore, some commentators have presented “plant blindness” as a medical model that needs a cure. We use this term in the context of the original piece by Wandersee and Schussler with the aim of bringing together a collection that goes “beyond plant blindness”, as outlined below. Various authors have described human perceptions of plants in the modern world as the “green stuff you ordinarily ignore” (Vogel, 2012, p. 1); “the mute, immobile furniture of our world” (Mancuso & Viola, 2015, p. xi); and even “screens for our self-image” (Marder, 2016, p. 25). Ironically, Marder's statement has come to fruition in an age where “the selfie” photograph has an increasing role in social relations between humans and their environment (Weilenmann & Hillman, 2019), sometimes to the detriment of plants; see for example the news story “#Superbloom or #poppynightmare? Selfie chaos forces canyon closure.” (Gammon, 2019). Biology students, such as Ben Furness, admit that “when I walk to the bus stop, I don't pay attention to the trees I am passing. As a biology student, I am concerned with plants a lot, but in my daily life—like most people—I barely notice them” (Furness, 2019). This “not noticing” has inspired him to consider plants through drawing and through filmmaking (see, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuTkgcFjOWw). Drawing is also an activity discussed in our interview with Maura Flannery, a university biology educator, who uses it to engage her students with plants (Flannery, 2019; in this issue, pp. 150). In this complex assemblage of plants and people, viewing plants in their wider ecological contexts has become increasingly difficult; as Susan E. Yoder has recently observed: “we are living in a moment of great paradox. Plants are everywhere. Yet plants are nowhere” (Drotleff, 2018). One critical reflection on debates concerning humans perceiving plants is the danger of assuming “everyone is just like us” (Knapp, 2019; in this issue, pp. 164) when it comes to developing an all-encompassing theory of “plant blindness”. In the seminal work, Plants as Persons: A philosophical botany Hall recognises the importance of diverse cultural relationships with plants and asks us to move beyond physiological limitations into philosophy. In addition, he asserts the importance of indigenous plant-based knowledge (e.g. as medicines and food) in the face of “plant blindness” (Hall, 2011). Such relationships not only concern inter-cultural differences, but also intra-cultural differences, as in, for example, those between grandparent and grandchild concerning memories of views of wild-flowers in a local field, long since built upon, eloquently described by Challenger: “Her memories overlay the landscape, haunting it with things I could not see or understand” (2011, p. 29). Being in gardens can show us myriad ways of seeing plants, their histories and possible futures (Kincaid, 2000; Sandilands, 2018). Sandilands sees her garden as “a barometer for climate change” and considers the Clematis jackmanii as representing both a colonialist history and horticultural capitalism. She laments the loss of floral diversity caused by inbreeding in a limited number of cultivars and wonders if the “favouring of these cultivars by gardeners and industry means that less attention is paid to species that invite different kinds of relationship” (Sandilands, 2018). Plants classified as “weeds” would be such an example, as Kopnina has observed: “Plants in general and urban greenery in particular in developed industrial societies have become subjectified to cultivation, grooming, trimming of plants that are considered 'good’ and eradication of plants that are considered ‘bad’ (2013, p. 12)”. This is exemplified in the recent case of Sheffield Council, UK, removing mature street trees without due consultation with communities, as noted in this news report: “Trees matter to the planet and they matter to communities” (Streets Ahead, 2018). “My creative process allows me intimate access to, and connection with, botanical subjects. I enjoy creating narratives about the co-relation between beauty of nature and well-being through my work” (Law, 2019; in this issue, pp. 146). In 2018, the art gallery Tate Britain held an exhibition entitled “All Too Human” the exhibition explored “how artists in Britain have stretched the possibilities of paint in order to capture life around them” (Tate Britain, 2018). One painting selected for the show stood out in its absence of a human subject: “Two Plants” (1977–1980) by Lucian Freud (Figure 1). Freud had included plants as subjects since 1951, for example in his painting “Interior in Paddington” (Aloi, 2017). In the context of plant invisibility, two aspects of “Two Plants” and Freud's relationship to it are pertinent. Firstly, Freud defined the painting as, “lots of little portraits of leaves… I wanted it to have a really biological feeling of things growing and fading and leaves coming up and others dying”. Secondly, the portrayed plants struggled to stay alive during the 3 years the painting took to complete, and thus their detailed portraits were brought to human attention under physical duress (Tate Gallery, 2019). The curatorial decision to include them in a large show, mainly focused on human subjectivity is an interesting one, as it connects closely observed botanical complexity with qualities of intimate human portraiture, and critically, does not attempt to replace faces with flowers but instead portrays leaves, thus revealing a significant organ of “plantiness” (see for example Farmer, 2014; Lee, 2017; Vogel, 2012). Indeed, Aloi has argued for more academic attention to Freud's painting of plants in the context of plant studies (Aloi, 2017) and asks how might art enable new ways of seeing plants? Artists, such as Snæbjörnsdóttir & Wilson take a biographical approach to inform their art-based research of seeds, their adult forms, and their human collector (Joy, 2009). In so doing they foreground a narrative often absent from human engagement with the seed-bearing plant's life cycle- the seed itself, enlarged through Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) technology and carefully coloured in association with periods of long observation of their complex surfaces (Figure 2). The adult plant portrait recedes into a monochrome background and the human collector becomes a scientific footnote. Thus we, the human onlookers, are confronted with the presence of the enlarged seed in all its structural complexity and aesthetic beauty. It is not just modern art-based research that offers a doorway into “plantiness”; many earlier painters present a rich library of images we can bring to human–plant experiences; for example, the Durer painting “Das Grosse Rasenstuck” used to illustrate Grass Blindness in Thomas (2019; in this issue, pp. 197). This is a painting, in which the artist “takes a worm's eye view, showing his plants almost life-size”. He brings the details of each individual plant to the human viewer (Pavord, 2005, p. 140). These artists, writers, and filmmakers draw our attention to an important question, how do place and plants figure in the human imagination when we are living in a world, in which human-related activities are often trans-global? Where might plant symbolism, human narratives and representations sit in these complex socio-cultural spaces? These questions inform the work of Sachdev (2019; in this issue, pp. 271) and Aloi (2019; in this issue, pp. 204) when they consider plants, and their representations, in two diverse contexts rooted in cultural and political symbolism. In the light of the ecological challenges facing 21st century Earth, this issue of Plants, People, Planet represents a collection of peer-reviewed cross-disciplinary papers on “plant blindness” seen through a variety of international perspectives. They both provoke and answer questions concerned with how humans relate to plants. As the philosopher Kierkegaard writes in Either/Or; “I cannot see the grass grow, but since I cannot I don't feel at all inclined to” (Kierkegaard cited in Marder, 1992). Thus, our examinations of “plant blindness” go beyond the act of sensory comprehension and the communication of plant science and extend into cultural representations; for this is the complexity of the plant/human/planet relationship. “They are slow: usually they look today just like they did yesterday and we have to wait, sometimes a long time, to see changes in them” (Koller, 2011, p. xiii). But, what if the “life in the slow lane” image of plants is a stereotypical characteristic that we humans have placed onto plants? And what if it is human perception, not the plant that is “trapped in time” (Sanders, 2019)? Perhaps a wider repertoire of stories is needed to draw on when endearing human attention to “Life as Plant”? In plant science, the contribution of very-high-resolution time-lapse photography for plant and ecosystems research has been recognized (Nichols, Steven, Sargent, Dille, & Schapiro, 2013). Can art play a role in these botanical conversations and “translate the world of science” as suggested by Scherer? (Scherer, 2019). But is it merely a case of translation or the deeper contribution that interdisciplinary perspectives might offer, as Vieira, Gagliano, and Ryan (2016) have proposed. “Deforestation has significantly reduced the only habitat of the orang-utan and other species, such as the pygmy elephant, clouded leopard, Sumatran rhino and other lesser known animals, as well as thousands of species of plants, which may disappear altogether within the next 20 years. The remaining forests are under extreme threat” (Orsato et al., 2013, p. 445). Consequently, as we move through Earth's history, to an era in which species extinction is extensive (IPBES Global Assessment, 2019; Willis, 2017), the gathering of plant stories from different perspectives has become ever more critical. Accordingly, humans need to consciously reframe plants beyond the status of silent witness to environmental change or as a commodified object of which we “barely speak”, and instead consider them as fundamental historical narratives. Plants are some of our planet's longest-lived species and many of their leaves “have imposed upon the vast majority of living beings a unique environment: the atmosphere” (Beerling, 2007; Coccia, 2019, p. 26; Orsato et al., 2013; Thomas, 2013). Despite the lack of human focus on plant populations, their biomass constitutes a substantial percentage of Earth's terrestrial biodiversity, as represented in the recent paper by Bar-On, Phillips, and Milo (2018, p. 6506): “We find that the kingdoms of life concentrate at different locations on the planet; plants (≈450 Gt C, the dominant kingdom) are primarily terrestrial” (Figure 3). In terms of weight comparison, human beings, as shown by Bar-On et al, are insignificant; it is the plant kingdom that dominates: if “the tower of life were an office block plants would be the main tenants taking up dozens of floors” (https://t.co/aryW2STvbC). Humans are 0.01% of Earth's biomass and yet “the impact of human civilization on global biomass has not been limited to mammals but has also profoundly reshaped the total quantity of carbon sequestered by plants”. (Bar-On et al., 2018, p. 6508). Thus, “seeing plants” in the world includes recognition of the critical ecological functions they support (Hiscock et al., 2019) through their diversity and biomass and, importantly, their role in our survival; for it appears that even in representations of the deep geological past, plants have barely been covered, as Vujaković demonstrates, where he argues for a more “phytocentric” representation of Earth's history (2019; in this issue, pp. 188). “Scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and Stockholm University found that 571 plant species had disappeared in the last two and a half centuries, a number that is more than twice the number of birds, mammals and amphibians recorded as extinct (a combined total of 217 species)” (Briggs, 2019). Notably, the study authors recommend that we “teach our children to see and recognise local plants” (Humphreys, Govaerts, Ficinski, Lughadha, & Vorontsova, 2019). “Our results imply that for upon the of individual it is to the individual and to in the context of the This students with individual the opportunity to their Thus, they we not that be provoked by such as plants and In addition, us our attention on plants that are to us as, this us into a (Knapp, 2019) which can the of the garden of human and thus the world in that to “the that for our 2011, pp. a needs to be between perceptions of human and the of “plantiness” such as these that of plants to struggle more than others to presence and in human as Thomas in his plants are some invisibility, and some have upon are a case in for the as they in Grass is in gardens, and but usually as a background for other more interesting humans at and how plants are in contexts such as science and botanical gardens, when presented animals, on their human views of plants & 2019; in this issue, pp. of the plants” in their one is and uses to look less plants” (Figure In to Wandersee and theory “plant blindness”, it is significant that this of their work has been in bringing attention to plants. as (2018, p. see the not the the not the the not the We are to see animals, and to see This and Wandersee and work on human plant us with a for not seeing plants but to a and of our sensory Furthermore, in our human engagement with this it is important that we do not to subject plants to of by “the (2011, p. but to engage with their “plantiness” (Fleming, 2017). in the context of and have argued the case for from on and instead on that for and their In their work on “plant blindness” Wandersee and Schussler p. found the in human “plant bringing plants to in growing plants under the of a and adult was a of attention to, in, and scientific understanding of was a great change of to be at things and theory and It was but I also from the with a of knowledge to visual that students struggle to between and seed students have a knowledge about the function of than about the function of are most with seed by and by As noted is the to move beyond the all-encompassing term “plant blindness” and and in so doing the complexity of with an that has an different from one that 2019; in to the for their p. 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