It was a Monday morning in our lab’s weekly meeting. My turn to lead the journal club had arrived, but instead of dissecting a recent paper, I decided to run an experiment of my own. On each slide I placed photos of plants found right on our university campus, tall trees, familiar shrubs, medicinal herbs, ferns, and even tiny mosses. Then I asked the room to identify them. There were nearly 40 people present: graduate students, postdocs, research associates, and professors. Every one of them worked on plants in some form, plant biotechnology, plant pathology, specialized metabolism. Yet to my surprise, most struggled. Very few could name more than two or three species. I was shocked. This was not a random audience, it was the majority of the university’s plant research community. And yet their blank faces confirmed something I had often heard but never fully believed: “plant blindness is real, even among plant scientists”.
Plant blindness is the tendency to overlook plants in our environment, to treat them as background rather than as living organisms central to ecosystems and human life. To me, that idea had always seemed absurd. I grew up surrounded by plants, and I had learned to see them not as scenery but as companions[1].
Roots in tradition
Perhaps my perspective is biased. Although she was a school teacher, my mother came from a long line of traditional healers in Sri Lanka, a lineage that, according to family stories, served kings over a thousand years ago. She could name nearly every herb in our village garden and describe its medicinal use. As a child, I followed her through fields and backyards, peppering her with questions. She always had answers, passed down through generations. At 15, during a school break, I read a Sinhala translation of the Charaka Samhita, one of the classical texts of Ayurveda. Its pages fascinated me. Plants that grew leaves only during the waxing moon and shed them in the waning half; herbs collected during solar or lunar eclipses for specific remedies; flowers plucked at dawn to heal fevers. The language was magical, merging observation with myth, science with poetry.
My uncle, himself a practicing healer, often visited us. In the evenings, by the light of a kerosene lantern, we had no electricity then, he would sit in our courtyard and tell stories. Some were about healing plants, others about myths and the lives of ancestors. To a child’s imagination, those evenings were an initiation into a world where plants were alive with meaning and power. Inspired, I began planting medicinal species in our backyard, watching them grow with reverence. For me, the idea that anyone could be “blind” to plants seemed impossible.
A new generation’s curiosity
Years later, as I neared the end of my Ph.D., I returned to Sri Lanka for several months to write my thesis. It was during this time that I met my nephews for the first time, one four and a half years old, the other just two and a half. Watching them explore my parents’ garden reminded me of myself at their age, and showed me something important: curiosity about plants is not a relic of tradition, but a natural trait of childhood, if only it is encouraged. Our family garden is more than a backyard, it is a small ecosystem. There are more than 20 fruit species, plus coconuts, cinnamon trees, coffee shrubs, pepper vines, vegetables, and countless herbs. To my nephews, it is a playground and a classroom. The younger one pulls at a curry leaf branch and asks, “Elder Father, why do you pick Kalipinna?” He refuses hot peppers, declaring, “That’s miris, I can’t eat it.” He divides banana bunches between himself and his brother, claiming ownership of the larger one. Even at his age, he notices details, pointing out caterpillars on leaves and asking me if I’ve seen them too. Even his vocabulary is rooted in plants. Green is kolakanda paata—the color of herbal porridge. Yellow is kakkan paata, the color of ripe bananas. Red is gini paata, the color of fire. When my mother’s tomato plants begin to ripen, he announces their color change day by day, until he and his brother rush out each morning to see the transformation. They marvel when flowers give way to tiny fruits. They ask questions when I hand-pollinate blossoms, and my nephew tries to copy me with his small fingers.
What astonishes me most is the instinct for experimentation of my older nephew (still four and half years old). When hibiscus flowers bloom, he rushes to my mother and insists she make bright red lime juice. He prefers blue clitoria flowers, because their color turns pink with citrus. He collects petals, crushes them into extracts, mixes them with lime, and watches the colors shift. Then he stores the mixtures in small vials, ready for a “magic show” whenever guests visit. His eyes shine as he demonstrates, a tiny scientist in action. Their curiosity extends to the healing power of plants. Once, when my mother was hospitalized, my older nephew gathered some herbs and sent them to her, certain they would heal her wounds. They chew cinnamon twigs, exclaiming at the sweetness. They follow my mother through the garden, collecting leaves for herbal porridge, and now they can identify most of the plants she uses. For them, plants are not just food. They are medicine, chemistry, and wonder.
Plant blindness begins later
Watching my nephews, I realized something profound. Plant blindness is not innate[2]. Children are natural observers. They see the details adults overlook. They notice caterpillars chewing leaves, flowers turning into fruit, and the sweetness hidden in a twig. They ask questions relentlessly, and to them, plants are not background but central to life. So perhaps plant blindness develops later, as we grow older. Perhaps it is nurtured not by nature but by neglect, by parents too busy to answer questions, by schools that emphasize abstract science over living observation, by societies that prize screens more than gardens. If we ignore children’s curiosity, it fades. But if we nurture it, it grows into lifelong awareness [3].
Lessons for scientists and educators
This realization brought me back to that Monday morning in my lab, staring at blank faces as colleagues struggled to name the plants around them. These were not indifferent people. They were skilled scientists, immersed in molecular details, genetic pathways, and biochemical assays. But somewhere along the way, the ability, or the habit, of seeing whole plants had slipped away. As scientists, we must ask ourselves: what do we lose when we stop seeing? Beyond taxonomy, we risk losing connection to the very organisms we study. We risk missing the broader ecological and cultural context in which plants live. And we risk reinforcing a kind of blindness that extends beyond science into society, where plants are undervalued despite their central role in sustaining life [4].
Avoiding plant blindness does not require advanced training. It begins with observation, with noticing what children see naturally. A flower fading into a fruit. A caterpillar chewing. A leaf changing color in the rain. These are the details that spark wonder and lead to deeper understanding.
Keeping the world green in our eyes
For me, the lesson is simple. Let children be the best observers in nature. Encourage their questions, celebrate their experiments, and share in their discoveries. Let them learn that plants are not background scenery, but living companions, sources of food, medicine, color, and life itself. Plant blindness is not inevitable. It is preventable, if we nurture curiosity instead of letting it fade [5]. My nephews reminded me of what I learned in childhood and what I nearly forgot as an adult scientist: the world is green, alive, and waiting to be noticed.
- Achurra, A. Plant blindness: A focus on its biological basis. in Frontiers in Education. 2022. Frontiers Media SA.
- Balding, M. and K.J. Williams, Plant blindness and the implications for plant conservation. Conservation biology, 2016. 30(6): p. 1192-1199.
- London, U.C. Urban life causes “plant blindness” but foraging could be the cure. 2022; Available from: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2022/oct/urban-life-causes-plant-blindness-foraging-could-be-cure?
- Fiel’ardh, K., I. Fardhani, and H. Fujii, Integrating perspectives from education for sustainable development to foster plant awareness among trainee science teachers: A mixed methods study. Sustainability, 2023. 15(9): p. 7395.
- Wandersee, J.H. and E.E. Schussler, Preventing plant blindness. The American biology teacher, 1999. 61(2): p. 82-86.