Back to StoriesSeeing Green: How to Make Friends with a Plant
August 22, 2024
Seeing Green: How to Make Friends with a PlantMoJo columnist Susan Marsh writes about her relationships with flora and how to avoid ‘plant blindness’
"All lodgepole pines in our region bear this message," Marsh writes. "To never give up. To do your best, the way you have always done. You can’t help the future." Photo by Jacob W. Frank/NPS
by
Susan Marsh
When I was a small child, a traumatic event occurred that
may be familiar to many: my beloved 10-acre woodlot beside my parents’ house
was destroyed and replaced by houses. I was too young to consider that the
house I lived in had been part of that forest before we moved in, and the loss
contributed to a lifelong desire to preserve what remains of both forests and
individual trees.
The science of ecology, thanks to the writers who have
brought its discoveries to our attention, has helped us recognize forests not only
as collections of individual trees but as interconnected, interdependent
communities of myriad living things. Forests include shrubs, forbs, grasses,
mosses and ferns, fungi, arthropods, birds and mammals, reptiles and amphibians,
and microorganisms that live in the soil, water and tissues of the plants. This
is a concept I think many forest lovers understand intuitively, but the more we
learn the more amazing it becomes.
Yet, connections with plants that we make at a deep
emotional level often start with individual specimens, whether the gently
branching trees we climbed as children or the wildflowers we planted in the
garden from seed that keep coming up each spring.
While there are obvious differences between people and
trees, in the company of trees I find kinship. Like me, they are alive. Like
me, they have needs if they are to continue living.
While some of us commune with plants as individuals or
necessary components of a place, others may not notice them at all. Plant
blindness is more common than plant appreciation. And “plant blindness” is a real term, not something I made up. It
refers to the human tendency to ignore plants in the environment to the point
where we don’t notice their various colors, textures and shapes. To many,
plants are simply part of a pleasing backdrop.
Research suggests that humans are programmed to notice
plants less distinctively than we do animals. Flora grow together with numerous
species blending in, and they don’t move around. They don’t have faces, and for
the most part they don’t pose a potential threat in the way a giant cave bear might.
While there are obvious differences between people and trees, in the company of trees I find kinship. Like me, they are alive. Like me, they have needs if they are to continue living.
Intimacy with plants can be improved by simply paying more
attention to them. Each has a signature shape, texture, shade of green, height,
fragrance, and ecotype where it is found. Sometimes while hiking along a ridge
I’ll give myself a little test. How many distinct shades of green can I see? Can
I spot lodgepole pines and subalpine firs by their shapes and hues? Can I sort grasses
from rushes in a wet meadow? With practice, this is doable from quite a
distance.
In a world where plant blindness is the norm, what is
it like to love native plants not only as recognizable species but as individuals?
Familiar trails are alive with mini-landmarks: the aspen trunk that held a
basketball-sized hornet nest one year; the single hawthorn I’ve seen along a
local trail system of many miles, the young Douglas-fir where a northern pygmy
owl perched long enough for me to snap a half-decent photo. Together they signal
my inhabitance at a deeper level, making me believe I belong here because I
know the neighbors.
Poor plant awareness involves not only a failure to
notice them, but also a disregard for the importance of plant life to people
and other animals. Too often we treat them as mere things, discarding showy—and
expensive—flower cultivars after they have served their purpose as summertime decoration.
Our lawns are simply something to walk on. Children know better, I think; they watch
in wonder as bees and butterflies attend garden sunflowers, and lie on their
bellies in the grass to watch ants, beetles and other small creatures climb
among the green blades like hikers through a forest.
Sometimes while hiking along a ridge I’ll give myself a little test. How many distinct shades of green can I see? Can I spot lodgepole pines and subalpine firs by their shapes and hues?
I remember doing that as a kid, and perhaps that’s why
I’m still one of those oddballs who considers plants as friends. They don’t
have to return the affection; that isn’t their job. This love for plants comes largely
from a combination of daily doses of outdoor play when I was small, along with the
trauma of losing the forested lot next to our house when I was growing up.
I might not feel so strongly if I had not known the plants
I grew up with as individuals. A young madrone that I climbed in a dress and
patent leather shoes, a mature one in which my father hung a swing. The
blackberry patch where my mother and I picked berries for pies, whose fragrance
while baking I can smell as I write. The half-dozen trillium bulbs she and I
dug up from the doomed woods and transplanted into our yard.
I address my botanic friends as I would any other
friend, with simple greetings. “There you are,” I say to the emerging leaves of
the turkey-peas I transplanted from a vacant field that was about to be dug up
for construction.
Turkey peas (Orogenia
linearifolia) is a diminutive member of the parsley family, native to only
six states in the northwestern U.S. <photo 1 near
here> It’s the first wildflower I see while the snow is melting in
spring, sometimes as early as March. Unsure about whether it would live in my
front yard, I planted the one I dug up in a spot as similar to its original
home as I could manage, and for the past three years it has come up and bloomed.
Each time I see its first slender leaves, I rejoice. I wait for it, greet it,
water and talk to it, keep the clover and grass clipped short until it has
finished its brief cycle of life and returns to the soil as a starchy root
resembling a knobby, muddy carrot.
Another individual plant I love is a particular lodgepole
pine. Among the most abundant of conifers in the Yellowstone region, this
species typically grows into even-aged stands of tall, straight trees that have
earned the nickname Pinus monotonous
for their seemingly endless regularity.
But my favorite lodgepole is nothing like these trees.
Instead of reaching for the sky, it’s barely 10 feet tall. From its perch at
the edge of an eroding cut slope above a busy highway, it spreads its up-curved
branches to form a shrubby claw. Half its roots dangle uselessly in the air, but
the tree is well plugged into the stiff clay soil of a slowly creeping landslide,
and it has grown that way for decades.
A tree with nothing to provide in the way of lumber or
firewood, a tree that seems never to produce a cone or furnish a resting spot
for a passing jay, the little lodgepole offers me the finest gift of all: an
embodiment of resilience, tenacity and hope. Like the woods of my childhood, it
lives on a precarious edge. It stands as a reminder for how to live in the face
of potential catastrophe. To never give up. To do your best, the way you have
always done. You can’t help the future.
All lodgepole pines in our region bear this message. They
evolved with, and depend in great measure upon, periodic wildfire. The
lodgepole has adapted to a regime of large, infrequent fires by developing
various types of cones. Some open readily, their seeds sprouting and growing
wherever there is enough sunlight. Other cones are tightly closed by resin.
Heat softens the pitch, allowing the cones to open. Some of these serotinous
(late-opening) cones require the heat of a wildfire; others can open at lower
temperatures. Place the clenched fist of one on asphalt on a summer afternoon
and watch. <photo
2 near here>
A view across the hills near Yellowstone’s Lewis River
Canyon, which burned in wildfires of 1988, reveals a patchwork of shrubs,
sedge, grass and aspens. In among these, dense stands of young lodgepole pine
erupt from the charred logs. Cones placed underground by squirrels were
protected from the fire’s heat and the constant churning of soil by rodents
helped bring them to the surface where the seeds find conditions for sprouting.
Thus, an aging forest, swept away by flames, has become a diverse mosaic of
young pine, aspen, grasses and wildflowers.
Lodgepole pine is considered by many forestry experts to
be an intermediate seral species, growing thick as dog hair in the wake of fire
and giving way to spruce and fir after a century or so. We haven’t given the
lodgepole credit for its true measure of persistence. I’ve seen trees over 300
years old that show no sign of readiness to turn over their spot to the firs
crowding around them. I’ve walked through open, park-like forests with miles of
whortleberry covering the ground below. These lodgepole stands are splendid,
lining the trail with thick straight boles, sunlight slanting between them.
They do not hide the view of lakes and peaks, they are part of the view, the
frame of the picture.
Perhaps it is the memory of walking through such
stands, from Montana’s West Pioneer Mountains to the Salt River Range in
Wyoming, that brings me to a general state of affection for stands of lodgepole
pine. Perhaps it is my gratitude for years of woodstove warmth. But the oddly
shaped outliers, like the little pine above the highway, capture my attention as
individuals. They help me appreciate the life force required to be a
tree—something easily overlooked because it does not look back. And for these
and other reasons, they remain in my memory and heart.
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