We do not want to “cure plant blindness” we want to grow plant love

Every week, we share plant love stories in this space. This project began as a collaboration between conservation scientists who wanted to celebrate the connections between people and plants. Our careers are built on millions of observations of plant traits, or measurements of their seeds, or counts of their pollen. We spend weeks and months writing up academic journal articles that often flatten the touch and smell of plants into numbers, variables, plots, and transects; the figures are points and boxplots that elide the delicate petals or intricate twists of roots we studied. We love our research subjects (well, maybe not the invasive ones), but we also love to eat, and smell, and climb, and share them.

Sara Kuebbing and Caitlin McDonough MacKenzie, co-first authors of the Plant Love Stories letter to the editor enjoy a moment together at the Botany 2019 conference in their favorite Plant Love Stories threads.

This project began as a kind of escape from academic journal writing, but this week we are excited to present a plant love story from the pages of the peer-reviewed journal Plants, People, Planet. We wrote a letter to the editor for the journal's special issue, 'Standing in the shadows of plants: new perspectives on plant blindness.' When we first began Plant Love Stories, we talked amongst ourselves about our discomfort with the popular term 'plant blindness'. And while we intentionally omitted the term from our website, we never shared the story behind this decision. Here is the story: We do not want to “cure plant blindness” we want to grow plant love. (click for the full text of our letter)

We have a duty to conserve plants for the health of current and future generations. To do that, we, as a community of scientists, need to move plants from the background and into the foreground of people's hearts and minds. Effective movements need a clear, unifying rallying cry. We have made a decision not to use “curing plant blindness” as ours. Instead, we would like to encourage an honest and inclusive discussion about the disenfranchising and exclusionary term “plant blindness.”

...Plant Love Stories values a diversity of experiences with plants. An appreciation of plants is not just about seeing plants, it can encompass all of our senses and emotions. Our collection of stories are also about smelling plants like milkweeds, prairie dropseed, and allergy trees; hearing plants that have funny voices and divulging secrets to our cacti; tasting fruits like tomatoes, mangoes, and lemons and leaves like garlic mustard; feeling the texture of plants by rubbing dandelions under our chins or scraping our legs as we wade through Juncus marshes. Our relationships with plants can be a vehicle for discovering deep personal insights, forming lifelong relationships with other humans, getting through serious illness, and remembering those we have lost. We believe that everyone has a Plant Love Story in their lives, even if they do not think they do. We do not share these stories to “cure” or “prevent” or “stop” anything. Rather, we bring attention to these emotional relationships that already exist. We choose not to root ourselves in metaphors that assume that all people experience the world in the same way; we hope others will consider this position as well.

Plant Sense: Part 1, Plant Scents

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Plants are beautiful. The have lovely colored flowers that decorate our yards and farms and wildlands. They can be tiny little herbaceous wildflowers hiding among the waterfalls or giant succulent cacti looming over the desert.  When we think about plants we tend to think about the way they look, but some of our Plant Love Stories explore sensory experiences with plants beyond their visual appearance. Because #PlantLove is not just about seeing plants--it encompasses all of our senses and emotion--The PLS Team wants to showcase some of our stories that engage a multitude of plant sensory experiences, starting with the sense of smell.

Time Traveling with Plant Scents:

There is an inexplicable connection between smells and memories that scientists are just beginning to understand. However, the potential for smells--especially plant smells--to evoke powerful memories is familiar and widely-celebrated.

“Smell is a potent wizard that transports you

across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived.

The odors of fruits waft me to my southern home,

to my childhood frolics in the peach orchard.

Other odors, instantaneous and fleeting,

cause my heart to dilate joyously or contract with remembered grief.

Even as I think of smells, my nose is full of scents

that start awake sweet memories

of summers gone and ripening fields far away.” 

― Hellen Keller

“I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers.

I remember where a toad may live

and what time the birds awaken in the summer --

and what trees and seasons smelled like --

how people looked and walked and smelled even.

The memory of odors is very rich.” 

― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Here are a few #PlantLoveStories that enrich the literary canon of plant smells and take us back in time:

The Fragrance of Milkweed

Author: Kathi Bletz

Scent: stunningly sweet smell of milkweed

A small patch of milkweeds evokes memories of long-ago summer adventures.

“The air is redolent

with the stunningly sweet smell of milkweed.

I pause, and breathe deeply

Mesmerized by the scent.”

The Disappearing Rice Bowl

Author: Kausthubha Yarath

Scent: petrichor

The scent of the earth after the rain reminds the author of her childhood and her family’s farmlands, and evokes a sadness as she contemplates the loss of the scent with the loss of the rains.

“My memories of India are distinctly olfactory. Nothing can quite compare to the musky smell of the earth after a rain softens the hard, cracked dirt. The way that the air can be dry and sharp one second and, the next second, the breeze gets heavy as rain clouds roll in over the horizon. With the first crack of thunder and sheet of rain, you are surrounded by the smell of fresh earth. “

The Scent of Lavender

Author: Richelle DeBlasio

Scent: lavender

Wafts of perfume recall summer days in the garden:

“Now that I no longer live at my parents’ home, I still occasionally smell lavender from the campus gardens or perhaps a perfume. No matter the origin, the smell is always unexpected yet prompts me to reminisce about my childhood.”

Fall(ing) for the Prairie

Author: Rebecca Tonietto

Scent: Prairie Dropseed

What does a prairie smell like in the Fall?

“The smell of Prairie Dropseed – that can’t-quite-explain-it, sweet-but-spicy just beginning of a scent that seems to disappear just as you are about to be able to describe it.

Can you say you get just a glimpse of a scent? It's like that.”

The Cinderella of Plants

Author:Sally Lin

Scent: jasmine

Sweet flower scents at night illicit childhood memories in Grandma’s garden.

“Those I remember best were the flowers jasmine and gardenia that bloom at dusk and produce this sweet aroma that filled the air. Even now, when I smell jasmine it brings back memories and I once again feel like a child. I adored those flowers for their sweet smell and they were always my favorite.”

Love is all Around

Author: Stephanie Frischie

Scent: sedge

Botanical trips to wetlands evoke memories of childhood fishing trips with dad:

“On those collecting trips, I never failed to squeal with delight when seeing Scleria verticillata in the wild. So scrawny and elegant at the same time and why and how does a sedge smell so amazing?”

Dusk to Dawn: an ephemeral love story

Authors: José Olivarez and Krissa Skogen

Scent: evening primrose 

This series of poems describes the hawkmoth using its sense of smell to pollinate evening primrose at night.  

“I don’t stay longer than one night in any one place; I don’t stop or slow for much. 

I fly into the wind, following a fleeting plume of sweet smells. 

Like others who work long shifts into the night, I like my cocktails. 

Gin infused with Earl Gray tea, jasmine, green apples. 

The bouquet of fragrance fills the air, whispers to me and I heed the call.”

Latent Cactus Surprise

by Keighley R.

I'm a plant person, in as much as anyone on this site is a plant person.

For me, plants are the right amount of responsibility. They allow me to connect with my fellow scientists in ecological and environmental labs, and - simply - they bring me joy.

I have had this cactus for years, and, for several months now, it has carried a small, grey, fuzzy poof off its side. For the longest time, I thought it was budding and I was such a proud plant mom. But, because I almost never even look at what kind of plant I'm buying, I wasn't about to look up what was happening. Maybe it's irresponsible; I prefer to call it an adventure.

One day, I come downstairs to make coffee and stare through the window I have flanked by indoor and outdoor plants, and I notice that the grey poof that has resided on my cactus for months is gone. Instead, there is a long, trumpeting arm reaching around my cactus towards the windowpane.

I am shocked and excited and worried. What if this means the end for one of my plant babies? What if it's growing up? What do I do? As any 20-something might, I turned to social media and asked my friends and internet strangers who were almost assuredly more informed about this sort of cactus behavior than I. I was informed that, yes, this happens and, yes, my cactus was likely going to die. I was crushed. In my attempts to capture what I was convinced would be my plant's final days, I photographed this flower's progress, completely unsure what would unveil when it would open.

While it was closed, It reminded me of something sinister from the magical realms of Harry Potter or the like. When it blossomed, though, I was treated to a gorgeous, massive white flower, seemingly hollow all the way through to the cactus' body. The way it balanced atop the neighboring succulent seemed far too precarious, but I was almost too nervous to touch it for fear that it may break off. After all, it was only attached by the smallest point to the cactus. For a few days, I admired the flower, the way it turned itself towards the window, even if I rotated the pot. The delicate flutter of the petals in the draft of the A/C, turned up high to battle the Texas summer.

Then, as quickly as it started, it was over.

After preparing my ritual coffee, I turned to my plants in the window and was crushed to see the flower laying on the sill. As the standard tropes of delicate and fleeting beauty danced around my subconscious thoughts, I began to think of how interesting it was that I had lived with that little grey poof for so long, just for it to suddenly and explosively burst into this gorgeous flower.

I study cancer, specifically, recurrence and dormancy in breast cancer. Dormancy is a relatively new idea in the cancer field, but it is something that has existed in the natural studies for much longer. Animals hibernate, plants over-winter, insects slow and hide. They are all dormant in some way, yet it is only within the last few decades that dormancy and cancer have collided.

Just as my cactus has lived with its foreign, fluffy, body, people often live healthy, happy lives with potentially-cancerous masses inside them. While the masses are small and benign, they carry the potential to be spectacular. Because, as scary as it is, cancer is spectacular in the way that it thrives, dominates, and grows. While this flower caused me to fear the demise of my cactus, it too, thrived, dominated, and grew in this spectacular way.

Keighley is a 4th year PhD Candidate studying at Baylor University in Texas. She is passionate about trans-disciplinary research, science communication, and community building. To learn more about her research and science communication, visit Keighley's website or follow her on twitter ( @ScienceKeighley) or instagram (@scientifikeighley).

For a cancer survivor's Plant Love Story, see JulieAnn Villa's piece - When it comes to cancer, bulbs are better than flowers.