Befriending the land - Learning plant diversity

by Irene Teixidor-Toneu

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Irene's plant art

What does it take to befriend a landscape? How can I get in touch and converse with a forest, meadow, or disturbed roadside? My personal answer has always been learning about its plants. When I was at university, studying biology, I took as many plant-related subjects I could: geobotany, plant diversity, lichens & algae, and vegetation cartography, and others. Nine in total, not a negligible sum after all. I found and still find plants utterly beautiful, attractive in their intricate detail and subtle movement.

Learning about them would slow me down, make me focus and observe the tiny differences that make a landscape rich, that make a landscape become familiar. Learning about plant diversity meant spending time outside, hiking, or just walking, with friends. Sometimes, actually often, pen and pencil would be instrumental support to learning through drawing. During this time, it was as if a microscope lens was being moved up and down until brought to focus. What I was observing was already there, but I had not been able to fully see it. 

A friend of mine once mentioned that she was able to see the forest through me, as I would point to all the different plant species that she would otherwise not notice. This was back home, on the northern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. I have lived in four different environments since and haven’t quite developed or nurtured this in-depth relationship with plants anywhere else. Not in the English mixed woods, the Moroccan high-altitude pastures, the Norwegian coastal shrublands, nor the Dutch dunes. I still go for walks, but the forests are blurry with a multitude of species in part undiscovered by me. Knowing many of the plants that grow in the oak-box wood or the thin-soil minuscule prairies next to the village where I grew up still roots me there. Calling a new land home will surely happen through getting to know and befriending its many plant species.

Irene Teixidor-Toneu is a postdoctoral researcher in ethnobotany based at the Natural History Museum, University of Oslo (Norway) with a special interest in the cultural evolution of people-plant relationships. Mother of a one-year-old and partner to a plant genomicist, mediocre gardener but avid plant lover. Find Irene on twitter @IreneToneu.

To all the Trees I've Loved Before

by Carly Ziter

This is a tree love story. Or perhaps more accurately, a tree love letter. An overdue thank you to the tall, strong, unwavering constants in the many places I have lived.

There are, or course, many reasons to love trees. Trees – as I so often point out when wearing my professor hat – provide myriad benefits to people. They shade us and cool the air. Filter pollutants. Provide food and shelter for beneficial birds and insects that bring us joy and pollinate our gardens. They give us wood to build the perfect crackling campfire, and paper to write on. But trees also provide something much less tangible, and arguably much richer. A sense of place and belonging. Somewhere to sit and contemplate your day. A meeting point for friends. We get to know them as individuals. And it is for these reasons, more than for their shade or the carbon in their trunks, that I remember and appreciate my own favourite trees.

And I find myself reflecting on this now in particular because – having just moved and on the precipice of a new, big, job – I am caught in the space between an old life and a new beginning. That ever-so-brief point of transition when you’ve mostly wrapped up loose ends from the past, but your new life hasn’t quite yet reached full speed. A space that lends itself to reflection and nostalgia.

Now, this isn’t necessarily a new space for me. As an academic, I’ve moved a lot in the past decade. Started over a lot. In somewhere between 5 and 8 cities... depending on what counts as long enough to ‘live’ somewhere. I’m not so unusual in this, of course. I suspect many readers of this blog are following a similar journey. And these meandering journeys might be measured, and remembered, in many ways. Perhaps you recall your past through apartments and homes lived in (That quirky apartment without a bathroom sink, but cheap rent, and a great roommate! The house with the perfect sunroom, and space for a canoe out back. The slightly decrepit field station you called home for 2 summers). You might also categorize your path by schools attended or jobs worked. Or maybe you think back in terms of people: neighbours and landlords and cups of tea with friends down the street. And I, too, measure my journey in all of these things.

But I also measure it in trees.

Carly's paper birch in her childhood backyard (left) and in a place of honor at her wedding (right). Wedding photograph by Veronique Moisan.

My childhood paper birch (Betula papyrifera). A sprawling, multi-trunked tree perfect for climbing with short arms and legs. How much of my childhood was spent in its branches? Thinking, dreaming, playing with friends. How many awkward family photos did it witness?

Garry Oak (Quercus garryana)

The formidable, moss and lichen-covered garry oak (Quercus garryana) on the nature preserve where I spent the summers of my junior and senior year of undergrad. The site of a hundred field-season lunches. Emblematic of a place where I not only learned to be a scientist, but learned to be independent. Learned a lot about being a person in this world.

The towering bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa) in Madison’s Orton Park – visited regularly throughout my PhD. A tree old enough to have witnessed the surrounding land’s transition from Madison’s original cemetery to its very first city park. Beloved not just by me, but a whole community as center stage of a long-running neighbourhood festival. Home, two nights per summer, to lights and silk ropes and acrobats. But special every other day of the year, too.

There are others, of course. The gorgeous tulip tree on McGill’s Mac campus, that greeted me after every long morning shuttle ride throughout a masters degree. The lilac in the corner of the first home I owned myself, in Newfoundland. A small tree, that somehow withstood all the wind and rain and snowstorms “The Rock” could throw at it.

These trees of course, cannot move cities, but are left behind. And yet, they have had a way of traveling along this journey with me, even when I thought I’d moved on. Plant love stories that intertwine with human love stories. My now-husband (without ever having set eyes on it before that day) proposed to me under the very same garry oak of my undergrad days. And branches from my childhood birch – tragically felled in a recent storm – unexpectedly adorned our wedding venue this fall. A gift from my father, who brought them the 900km from home to surprise me. They now sit on the mantle in my new home. A reminder of where I’ve come from, and the people that got me here.

MSc students Emily and Serena, and Carly (from left to right) planting trees at Concordia's Loyola Campus.

I haven’t yet met my favourite tree in my new neighbourhood. These things take some time. But as I look out my office window I spy a small grove of birch trees in the courtyard on campus (Betula pendula, perhaps?). And I’m going to take it as a good sign that I’ve landed in the right place.

Carly Ziter is a new assistant professor at Concordia University in Montreal, where she studies and teaches urban ecology, biodiversity, and ecosystem services. She has had an inordinate fondness for trees for as long as she can remember. In true absentminded professor fashion, Carly wrote this article on her phone, promptly forgot about it, and only re-discovered it a year later. At the initial time of writing, Carly was in her first week of a new faculty job at Concordia University. In the year since, students, staff, and colleagues came together to plant 185 new trees on Concordia’s Loyola campus. She hasn’t had time to get to know them yet, but she has a sneaking suspicion that a new favourite tree is among them, waiting. Maybe she even planted it herself.

Plant Love in The Lion King

by Arielle Ness-Cohn

Euphorbia bussei, one of Arielle's favorite plants in The Lion King (photo by Andrew Dreelin)

Many Plant Love Stories take place outdoors, but some of them happen at the movies!

We are very excited to share behind-the-scenes plant love from Arielle Ness-Cohn, Assistant Art Director of the new Lion King movie. Arielle worked to create the plant communities used in the film, and based on real Kenyan ecosystems.

We asked Arielle some questions about plants - real and virtual - and we’re sharing her answers here!

PLS: What was your experience with plants before The Lion King? Do you have any early life Plant Love Stories?

ANC: My experience with plants before The Lion King was probably as close to anyone’s who grew up loving nature and loving the outdoors. So not much other than appreciating the green world around me. I’d taken a number of biology classes so I had a good basis for understanding a bit about plant life cycles, biospheres, climates, etc. but nothing major.

Really, it was needing to focus on the incredibly specific details in every plant, tree, and grass in the movie - since we had to build them from scratch - that opened my eyes to seeing plants in a whole new way.

I’d had a bit of experience in species identification and had a start understanding key components of some species while working closely with the Art Director and Greens department on another movie, Kong Skull Island, where we had to create a field of tall grass to match a field that had already been shot in Australia, and an algae-covered swamp to match a swamp shot in Vietnam. So that was probably a good jumping off point.

PLS: Can you describe the work you did with plants on The Lion King?

ANC: It was my responsibility, guided by James Chinlund, our Production Designer, to manage the process of creating the background plants, trees, and grass species in the film on the art department side. Audrey Ferrera, the Sets Supervisor at MPC, helmed the previs and modeling team on the vfx side.

Our process started with getting reference images and photographs from James from his scout to Kenya. We dissected those images with our research team to determine which species grew where and made up which environments in The Lion King. Then we pared down the most important species that together created the different looks of each environment, and helped direct the illustrators and modelers on important features of the species, like where they grew, how they interacted with the other species nearby, how and where they should be dressed into the sets. We wanted to create as realistic plant life environments as possible in the world we were building.

PLS: People sometimes think of plants as part of the background, and not always as living things in their own right - did you feel this was the case in The Lion King?

ANC: Not at all. I think we all had to wrap our heads around thinking of plants and trees in a completely different way. They were a featured part of the story because they were no longer playing the role that most people experience in everyday life, that they’re the background, that they’ve been here all along.

We actually had to build every single plant and very purposefully place them into the sets. And in so many of the sets the trees and plants almost become the set itself: in the grasslands there’s often nothing around until a character stumbles on a bush or a tree sticking out of the landscape. In the jungle, the opposite is true, it’s the trees that create much of the look of the forest around us.

I would say though that I might have been the most significantly changed in the way I think of plants in the world, since I was the one so focused on that aspect specifically. But I definitely managed to get others to join in on the excitement (I even posted an article about noticing the trees at my desk for others to read), and the research team was 100% on my side.

PLS: What types of plant communities did you build as part of the movie?

ANC: We contained the film to 19 distinct plant communities, plus a section of dead trees and plants for when the Pridelands get destroyed later in the film. These plant communities ranged from the open grasslands, the more shaded foothills of Pride Rock, to each of the wooded and sandy areas of the riverbanks, out to the marshlands and the drier more rocky areas of the Pridelands. The jungle transitioned from the desert, to the moorlands, into the dense wet tree covered jungle zones, out to the meadows, and up top to the alpine pools. We did the best we could to honor the real zones of growth on these African mountains, and savannas.

PLS: Are all plants depicted based on real plants or if some are imaginary?

ANC: Every single plant was built off a real species. There were a few plants we had nick-names for, just for the sake of casually speaking about them, but all of our plants were listed by their scientific names. It also made it a lot easier to go back and find out more information about them, or look for additional reference material, by sticking to the genus-species nomenclature.

PLS: Were plants used to help set the “mood” of any scenes?

ANC: I’m not sure that any plants were really used to set the mood of the scenes, but there were definitely different environments and coloring chosen purposefully for different points in the film. For example the Can You Feel The Love Tonight scene is a very magical moment between the characters, so setting that in a mint-green meadow filled with soft grasses and flowers at magic hour was an important choice. And still that was based on real scouting and reference images of African plant communities.

PLS: What were some of your favorite plants in the film?

ANC: I definitely have a few favorite plants, and they are all the funky looking ones that now look normal to me but when i first started this process, felt like they were straight out of a Dr. Seuss book and i could not believe they were real! In the Pridelands I’d have to say the Euphorbia bussei tree with its wiggly succulent arms. In the jungle I absolutely love the Dendrosenecio adnivalis and the Lobelia bequaertii, look them up they are the coolest looking things! Looking back through all of these plants now I’m rediscovering what love I have for each of them, there are so many more i want to name, but i’ll stick to those for now :)

Dendrosenecio adnivalis (at left with bright leaves) in Rwenzori Mountains National Park, Uganda (photo by Manuel Werner)

PLS: What was the most frustrating thing about working with plants on the movie?

ANC: The plants needed to look different and unique for the world to feel real, and we needed to get the coloring just right so that they felt a part of nature and not a man-made creation. But at the same time we only had so many resources to do that. So one of the hardest things was figuring out which species were higher priority than others in needing to have multiple models, shapes, and textures to make the world feel full and honest.

PLS: For plant lovers that saw the original Lion King, what are some similarities and differences they can expect with regards to plants?

ANC: It is so funny going back and looking at how the cartoon plants were drawn in the original film. There are definitely a good amount of plants in the original but we have way more in this version, and they are incredibly accurate. Looking back at the original film there are two story Acacia trees! At least they were incredibly creative!

PLS: What was the most surprising thing you learned about plants working on the movie?

ANC: I learned that plants are just like people in a way. That as human beings we all belong to the same species - and we all look different - so it absolutely makes sense that plants that are the same species will have tons of different features from the next plant over! Of course not every tree in the forest looks and grows exactly the same, but it takes studying the differences to really start to understand what that means and to really let it sink in.

Arielle Ness-Cohn (left) and PLS's Becky Barak (full disclosure - we're cousins!)

Arielle Ness-Cohn is an LA based Production Designer and Art Director. She studied Theatre and Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and earned her MFA in Production Design at the American Film Institute. Arielle has since designed for film, television, and commercial productions, notably the HBO docuseries McMILLIONS (2020) and the feature film THE BLOODHOUND by Love & Death Productions (2018). Arielle has also Art Directed and Assistant Art Directed on film and commercial productions including Disney's THE LION KING (2019), which was the first feature film ever shot entirely in virtual reality. Arielle is a designer striving to use the natural and man-made beauty of our world to share the personal, societal, and cultural stories of its people.

Photo Credits:

Euphorbia bussei by Andrew Dreelin from iNaturalist

Dendrosenecio adnivalis, and other plants by Manuel Werner from Wikimedia