STEP ONE: Slow down. Pay attention. Go outside. Touch grass. STEP TWO: Grow Food.

BY HEATHER HANSMAN

It was spring when we first saw the house. Out front the lilac was blooming, as were the poppies and the first blush of roses. The massive tree we would soon learn was a water-sucking, bug-hosting, invasive Siberian elm was green and lush. I loved the way the house sat in the landscape, framed by the wild-looking hill behind, surrounded by trails that ran out the back gate into open space beyond. I wanted to live there, on the edge of a mountain in Southwest Colorado.

I’d never had land of my own before. For 20 years I drifted without anchor, searching for somewhere that resonated as home. The places I’d lived the longest were both basement apartments, where I’d set lonely pots of basil and peas on the patios. I was ready to grow deeper roots than that; more than just a house, a relationship with the land around it.

But the second the house was ours, I realized I had no idea what was growing or should grow there. I could identify a couple of obvious flowers, but other than that, the landscape was a tangled green blur. I’d always thought of myself as someone devoted to the outside world and connected to landscapes. I spent as much time as I could outside. But when I dug into my chunk of land, I realized I didn’t really know anything about roots.

The hillside that I had assumed was thick with native plants was actually scabbed with those punky Siberian elms, which seemed to vindictively scatter their seeds in abundance across the landscape. They hung over scrubby stands of bushes and grass, which tangled into each other. “I think we’re growing… alfalfa?” I told my husband after downloading an app that identifies plants. I started pulling things I thought were weeds, and then stopped, unsure if I was digging up something fragile and good. I had no connection to the ecology of my new home. It felt like a language I didn’t speak, one that filled the space around me.

We hired a guy named Moses to cut down some of the biggest invasive trees. When I asked him what we might grow instead, he said to look up the hill, past the fence, at the scrub of sage and pinion and oak, to pay attention to the burst of spring wildflowers, and to what survived the winter. “See what does well here, and then make it keep happening,” he said prophetically. But the seeing was the hard part.

Experiencing the natural world as an amorphous green blob, or failing to notice it at all, is a phenomenon called Plant Awareness Disparity, or, until recently, Plant Blindness—a term coined in the ’90s by biology education professors J. H. Wandersee and E. E. Schussler. It describes our inability to appreciate the complexity of the natural world around us because we fail to see the details. Researcher Kathryn Parsley, who advocated for the terminology change in a 2020 paper, explained to me that this phenomenon is becoming more widespread. She said it’s pervasive and getting worse due to a number of reasons: our dependency on technology separates us from the physical world around us; a cultural disinterest in teaching botany and natural history; and a fundamental lack of understanding about ecological systems as we become increasingly removed from agricultural practices and natural spaces. Even people like me, who purportedly care about nature, are less tapped into everything growing around us.

According to a 2011 study conducted by the Bureau of Land Management, kids can reportedly identify 100 times more brand logos than plant species. When Parsley studied this disparity in classrooms, students showed a complete lack of interest in plants because there were misconceptions about their value. “There’s no culture to support all the ways plants are important for our lives,” Parsley says.

Kids who don’t recognize plants become adults who don’t see them at all, and who don’t realize that so much of our food, medicine and ecological stability comes from plants. Parsley says that as we more frequently fail to notice the diversity and importance of plants, and unwittingly turn toward monoculture in our food systems and in our created landscapes (think grass lawns), we divorce ourselves from the crucial web of nature that holds up everything else. This disconnect is a socio-scientific issue, according to Parsley, and is partially rooted in a culture that undervalues science, botany and the natural world, and partially in our visual systems, which are hyper-focused on humans.

She says it’s not a moral failing— humans are inherently focused on humans—but in disregarding the natural world around us we’re losing an important sense of what makes landscapes resilient, and of how much we depend on the diversity of living things. “Our knowledge of our world around us is impactful on our psyche as a species,” Parsley says. “The more we neglect our environment, the more we continue to seal our fate.”

It’s a large-scale problem, because plants undergird so many other things, but she says the best way to address it is individually—to create a framework for people to cultivate personal relationships with plants. She says it often starts in childhood, when we’re more likely to play in the dirt, but it’s harder to institute that connection in schools these days, in part because schools have moved away from natural sciences. A 2022 paper published in Ecology and Evolution reported that botany curriculum had gone from compulsory to nonexistent over the past 20 years. I remember sticking an avocado pit in a cup of water and watching it sprout, but that’s about it.

Parsley says that outside of the formal education system there are opportunities to up your own education at places like national parks, botanical gardens and seed libraries. Still, they’re often self-selecting and geared toward people who already care.

So what does someone like me, who is remedially and embarrassingly becoming aware of their own plant awareness disparity, do? Parsley says the first step is to slow down and pay attention. Go outside. Touch grass. Part of the overwhelm is that once you start looking, there’s so much to see and it’s so complex. Just as building community doesn’t happen overnight, you can’t rush the knowing, and you can’t begin planting until you have the lay of the land.

Next, she tells people to grow food. She says it’s the most immediate way to see what seeds need, and to understand soil, light and what it takes for something to grow.

And here’s the good news: You don’t have to figure it out alone like I did, randomly pulling at potential weeds. There are resources. Technology is taking us away from the physical world, but technology like those plant identification apps can also help you learn what you have, what you might want, and what makes sense for your ecosystem.

It’s been two springs now in my new home, and I’ve seen the seasonal cycle of growing and dying. I first tried to find a long-term baseline of knowing, an initial branch of roots. Then I watched, chanting names to myself as I did: globemallow, sage, white fir, rabbitbrush. I started to notice those plants in other places. I could see the cinnamon bark of Ponderosa and the spread of scrub oak. I’ve hacked out the trees I knew were invasive; I learned to identify them by their weak limbs and diamond-shaped leaves.

The plant list in my phone grew, unromantic, but a marker of accrued knowledge. It was like putting glasses on and realizing how many details I had missed, how much more nuanced the world was than I had assumed.

Last summer I followed Parsley’s instructions to grow some food, to see what it takes. I had an overabundance of tomatoes and squash because I panic-planted too much, but I learned to see how the kale shot up in succession and how the zucchini blossoms bent to the light. It felt like I was finally putting down roots. This summer I will remind myself that I have time, that I live here now, and I’m committed to the complexities and the work.

Parsley says it’s our responsibility to be stewards. “It feels like it’s getting worse. There’s such an attack on science happening right now and there are not enough people in power who see our effect on the planet and want to help it,” she says. “But I do also feel like people are starting to catch on, and people are taking things into their own hands.”

I’m catching on and learning that my patch is a prism of so many other places. This land, with its crackly soil and unforgiving weeds along with its pockets of unplanned beauty that spread out into the other landscapes beyond my fence, is slowly starting to feel
like home.

Heather Hansman is the author of Powder Days and Downriver, . She lives in Southwest Colorado.