Seeing Green: How to Make Friends with a Plant

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.

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.

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.