Do you really see plants? Humans and their plant blindness

What do you see in the picture? An elephant, right? Some will say that they see an African elephant, or perhaps an elephant in the savannah protecting from the sun in the shade of a tree. But who sees an elephant and a majestic flowering baobab surrounded by savannah shrubs in a dry grass meadow? If your answer is the latter, congratulations, you are a quite unique case. If in the picture you just see “an elephant” then you are just like most of the people around you. This phenomenon was first described in the 90s by two American botanists with the name of plant blindness. We are unable to see, notice and pay attention to plants surrounding us and therefore we have an hard time understanding their essential ecological role. We fail to appreciate the aesthetic features of these living organisms and the uniqueness of their biological characteristics, to the point of not being able to recognize plant species growing in our neighborhood or knowing what a plant really needs to survive....

Wandersee, J., & Schussler, E. (1999) Preventing Plant Blindness. The American Biology Teacher, 61(2), 82-86. DOI: 10.2307/4450624  

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