When we first grew up, unless you somehow had a very plugged in family who was teaching you species names at the very beginning of your life, I know for me

I certainly was and Rachel Tancock back in the show The Nature Educator sounds like you had a pretty nature forward upbringing Rachel, but I don't know if you would consider yourself to have been like plant blind until a certain point in your life and maybe we could even define the term.

Yeah, so plant blindness is basically the concept that when people are out in nature and they see plants, it's just all one plant.

So there's not like an understanding of species diversity and biodiversity and really being able to pick apart the different plants and it's not intentional.

It's completely unintentional.

So Wandersey and Schulzer are two scientists that came up with this concept in the 1990s and it can kind of stem from many different things.

It can come from your culture, so there's some cultures that are very, very into and with the natural world and knowing about the different plants and understanding like different uses of the plants.

And maybe yeah, maybe your family was were botanists and they're really knowledgeable, so you kind of learn that as you grew up.

But for a lot of people that's not the case or maybe you grew up in a very urban environment and didn't have a lot of access to nature so you just haven't been exposed to it.

But I think I did grow up in nature quite a bit growing up, but I do think I was plant blind for quite a while.

I did, I have memories of, you know, like of certain plants when I was younger, but I didn't know their names and I didn't understand the importance of each individual plant in an ecosystem.

But only in like my early 20s when I started my naturalist journey, did I start to really understand the difference between all these different plants.

And the more I learned, like the more curious I became and I wanted to learn more and yeah, so that's kind of what plant blindness is and my experience with it.

I would say I would have been plant blind until maybe my mid 20s because I started gardening 10, 11 years ago, so that would put me in my mid 20s.

So perhaps that is exactly when that stopped. I mean, it's not like I was full on plant plant, like I could tell back then at least, like I knew what a tomato plant looked like growing.

I think everyone knows the produce, right? Like almost everyone knows the produce just speaking from the edible gardeners lens, but it's shocking how few people, even those who are starting their first second year of gardening, still will not see the leaf structure and just instantly go, that's a cucumber, that's a squash, that's a tomato, that's it, you know.

And extending that out then towards like the landscaping that's around you in your native environment, even your urban environment, like those plants, it's such a constrained subset of plants that would normally be in the wild.

You build a pretty quick familiarity with them if you have the curiosity, right? Like you have a snake plant behind you right now and you'll see that all over the place in like a commercial setting, right?

So I don't know, for me, it was like once you have to find your in, for me, the in was, was of course the edible world. And once I found that I've started to really get into like the different species and let's say the carnivorous plant world or the ornamental plant world or perhaps some of these wild species.

And just it's in a way they are all just plants, but they all have these unique variables and characteristics that adapt them to the areas that they are sort of endemic to where they evolve from.

And you go, oh, I understand now why the picture plant has this structure in this way, it makes sense based on where it grows up.

I guess grows up from a geological time set, let's call it, but yeah, it's just fascinating once once you see it, it feels like you truly were blind before I don't know a better way to put it.

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