[PCA] Plant Blindness - Why don't people see plants?

[Patricia_DeAngelis at fws.gov]

This article was forwarded to me.

Patricia S. De Angelis, Ph.D.
Botanist - Division of Scientific Authority
Chair - Plant Conservation Alliance - Medicinal Plant Working Group
US Fish & Wildlife Service
4401 N. Fairfax Dr., Suite 110
Arlington, VA  22203
703-358-1708 x1753
FAX: 703-358-2276
Working for the conservation and sustainable use of our green natural 
resources.
<www.nps.gov/plants/medicinal>




From:  Plant Science Bulletin 47:1 
Published quarterly by Botanical Society of America, Inc., 1735 Neil Ave., 
Columbus, OH 43210 
http://www.botany.org/bsa/psb/2001/psb47-1.html


>From the Editor:
Many of us are employed at educational institutions and, at least on 
occasion, are assigned to teach in the freshman courses. This is a 
challenging assignment, and frequently a daunting one! How can so many 
students, the future leaders of our communities and country, have so 
little knowledge of and interest in plants? Why don't they realize how 
important plants are in the ecosystem? Too many of them don't even realize 
that plants are alive! It must be the fault of _____. 

Did you fill in the blank as you were reading the previous sentence? I 
know I have - on more than one occasion. The usual effect of this exercise 
is to re-set my challenge to make a difference in the classroom. It is the 
beginning of another crusade to "convert the ignorant masses" to the 
beauty, wonder, and importance of plants. Occasionally there is that 
notable success, the student who is "turned on" to plants and decides to 
pursue a career in the botanical sciences. For the most part, though, my 
reward is from the knowledge that I tried mightily, and my students really 
learned at least some of the concepts we discussed. Maybe I set my 
expectations too high. (Maybe my students are right - - my expectations 
are unreasonably high). But maybe there's an underlying problem that I'm 
not seeing much better than my fellow teachers at the pre-college levels. 

In this issue I've asked James Wandersee to elaborate on some of the work 
he and his students have been doing for the past several years. Jim is a 
botanist and science educator whose interests and research specialization 
are in the field of cognition - how students learn. Recently the lab has 
been concentrating on visual learning and their results indicate that 
"there may be more than meets the eye!"   - editor 

Toward a Theory of Plant Blindness
James Wandersee and Elizabeth E. Schussler

Introduction to the Problem 
We are two botanists and biology educators who are committed to exploring 
and investigating why people in the US tend to be less interested in 
plants than in animals, and why they often fail to notice the plants that 
are present in their own environment (Wandersee & Schussler, 1999a). We 
think such knowledge, once gained, may be useful in a variety of 
settings—from teaching an introductory biology course, to planning a 
public education program at a botanic garden, to writing a children's book 
about plants, to pursuing new botanical research. We also hope that the 
answers to these questions will ultimately lead to improvement of the 
nation's scientific literacy level, and to greater public understanding of 
plants (Flannery, 1999). The future of US research in the plant sciences 
depends, to a large extent, on the support of a botanically literate 
citizenry (Niklas, 1995). 

Acknowledging Prior Work 
Across the years, others, of much greater stature in the botany community 
than we, have pondered these same questions. Much of what they have 
observed and concluded has been both stimulating and helpful to us in 
beginning our own quest—and we have great respect for the work that they 
have done (cf. Bernhardt, 1999; Kramer, 1999; Sundberg, 2000). For 
example, prior explanations for US students' disinterest and inattention 
to plants have posited such underlying sources as zoochauvinistic 
introductory biology instructors, zoocentric examples used to teach basic 
biological concepts and principles, hypertechnical and uninteresting 
botany lessons, and underemphasis (or utter neglect) of plants in 
students' biological laboratory and field experiences (e.g., Darley 1990; 
Hershey, 1993, 1996; Nichols, 1919; Uno, 1994). 

The Quest for a New Theory 
However, the findings of our own research studies,including two recent 
nationwide studies on public perception of plants (Wandersee & 
Schussler,2000a), coupled with the general findings of other biology 
education and visual cognition researchers, suggest to us that the 
aforementioned sources may well be secondary factors, but the primary 
factor for explaining why people in the US often have a greater interest 
in animals than plants, and why they tend to pay little attention to the 
plants around them, is the way that humans perceive plants—due to the 
inherent constraints of their visual information processing systems. 
Theories are logical and principled systems that describe, predict, and 
explain. What follows represents the current state of our progress toward 
constructing a theory of plant blindness. 

The Pathway Leading to the Introduction of a New Term 
Following several years of preliminary discussions, library searches, 
small-scale investigations, and a fair amount of trepidation, in 1998 we 
decided to introduce a new term, plant blindness, to the US biology 
education literature (1998a). We did this because we thought the current 
state of inattention to and under-representation of plants—not just in 
biology instruction, but in US society in general—might be better 
explained by using research-based principles of human perception and 
visual cognition than by earlier, 
instructional-bias/deficiency-related-hypotheses—such as zoocentrism, 
zoo-chauvinism, and plant neglect. We also wanted the new term to be free 
of accumulated and inappropriate connotations, and to serve as a precursor 
term for use in explaining some of the resultant learning-related problems 
(cf. the secondary terms mentioned previously). 

Delimiting the New Term 
We coined the term plant blindness by reasoning that most people were 
already linguistically familiar with the use of the word blind as a 
metaphorical adjective suggesting missing visual information (e.g., blind 
date, blind seam, blind chance, blind alley, blind spot, snow blindness, 
need-blind admission). As for the limits of the word plant within our new 
term, our work thus far has been focused on the US public's inattention to 
and disinterest in understanding most angiosperms. So the term is most 
appropriately used in reference to the flowering plants. 

Defining the New Term 
Subsequently, we defined plant blindness as: the inability to see or 
notice the plants in one's own environment—leading to: (a) the inability 
to recognize the importance of plants in the biosphere, and in human 
affairs; (b) the inability to appreciate the aesthetic and unique 
biological features of the life forms belonging to the Plant Kingdom; and 
(c) the misguided, anthropocentric ranking of plants as inferior to 
animals, leading to the erroneous conclusion that they are unworthy of 
human consideration (Wandersee & Schussler, 1998a). 

Possible "Symptoms" of Plant Blindness 
We have proposed that persons afflicted with the condition known as plant 
blindness may exhibit symptoms such as the following: (a) failing to see, 
take notice of, or focus attention on the plants in one's daily life; (b) 
thinking that plants are merely the backdrop for animal life; (c) 
misunderstanding what kinds of matter and energy plants require to stay 
alive; (d) overlooking the importance of plants to one's daily affairs 
(Balick & Cox, 1996); (e) failing to distinguish between the differing 
time scales of plant and animal activity (Attenborough, 1995); (f) lacking 
hands-on experiences in growing, observing, and identifying plants in 
one's own geographic region; (g) failing to explain the basic plant 
science underlying nearby plant communities—including plant growth, 
nutrition, reproduction, and relevant ecological considerations; (h) 
lacking awareness that plants are central to a key biogeochemical 
cycle—the carbon cycle; and (i) being insensitive to the aesthetic 
qualities of plants and their structures—especially with respect to their 
adaptations, coevolution, colors, dispersal, diversity, growth habits, 
scents, sizes, sounds, spacing, strength, symmetry, tactility, tastes, and 
textures (Wandersee & Schussler, 1999a). 

Angiosperms, Flowers, and Visual Signal Values 
Raven, Evert, and Eichhorn (1986) have pointed out that "the angiosperms 
make up much of the visible world of modern plants" (emphasis added; p. 
584). Ghillean Prance, past Director of Royal Botanic Gardens—Kew, has 
said that his institution's research findings suggest that the earth is 
home to approximately 320,000 flowering plant species (Tangley, 1998). The 
key characteristic that sets the angiosperms apart from other plants is 
the flower (Bernhardt, 1999). Unlike animals, flowering plants cannot move 
from place to place to seek a mate; however, they have transcended their 
rooted condition via a set of features embodied in their flowers. 
Pollination by insects is basic in the angiosperms, and the first 
pollinating agents were probably beetles. The more attractive the plants' 
flowers were to the beetles, the more often they would be visited, and 
thus, the more seeds they would produce. Any changes in the floral 
phenotype that made such visits more frequent or more efficient offered an 
immediate selective advantage. Flower-visiting animals are drawn there by 
visual and/or olfactory attraction. Thus, plants were able to control 
their relationships with their pollinators, in part, by modifying their 
visual signal value through coevolution. To avoid or minimize herbivory, 
it is advantageous for the plants in a population to blend together 
visually. So, it could be said that, in effect, plants modify their visual 
signal values in accordance with the survival values conferred. 

Seeing Involves More Than Meets the Eye 
Why do many people tend to overlook the plants in their own environment? 
There is no simple scientific answer. First of all, most of us think that 
we see all of our surroundings simply by opening our eyelids and looking 
outward. Alas, there is much scientific evidence to reject that view 
(Catell, 1895; Nickerson & Adams, 1979). "No matter how hard we look, we 
see very little of what we look at," concludes Elkins (1996, p.11). 
Norretranders (1998, p. 126) has calculated that during visual perception, 
the human eye generates in excess of 10 million bits of data per second as 
input for visual processing, yet our brain ultimately extracts about 40 
bits of data per second from that immense data stream for our conscious 
vision to consider—of which about 16 bits per second is ultimately fully 
processed. This means that our sensory bandwidth "…is far lower than the 
bandwidth of our sensory perceptors." Only .0000016 of the data our eyes 
produce are actually considered consciously; it is assumed that the rest 
must somehow subliminally affect our thoughts, feelings, and actions, and 
this means that most of our mental life must take place subconsciously. It 
seems that visual consciousness is like a spotlight, not a floodlight. And 
if that is not shocking enough, we do not see events in real time 
(Norretranders, p. 210). The computation time involved in processing the 
visual data we receive has been shown by experiment to take approximately 
.5 second, making the present a self-delusion. Perhaps the most important 
take-home message we have gleaned from Norretranders' (p. 242) analysis is 
that, although large amounts of visual data are discarded, "…what is 
presented [to our conscious attention] is precisely that which is 
relevant." 

Factors That Affect People's Visual Attention 
"We [humans] …tend to be surprisingly bad at recalling details of objects 
we see or use daily," writes acclaimed memory researcher Alan Baddeley 
(1982). For example, just because we have looked at a lot of pennies 
during the course of our life doesn't mean we can draw an accurate picture 
of one. Psychologist Stephen Kosslyn of Harvard University cautions us in 
the very title of his article that "the mind is not a camera, the brain is 
not a VCR." Rugg (1998, p. 1151) emphasizes that "all events are not 
equal; they differ in how they are initially encoded into memory." He 
claims that two critical factors determine whether or not we will remember 
an event: the degree of attention we pay to it, and the meaning or 
importance we assign to it. We think that appropriate botanical education 
and plant-growing experiences can enhance the quality of both. 

Vision as Explained by Gibson's Ecological Optics 
Ware (2000, p. 35) urges us to think of the world as an "information 
display." Human visual perception is about interpreting and understanding 
patterns of light—light between 400-700 nanometers in wavelength—as 
absorbed, reflected, refracted, diffracted, scattered, or transmitted 
within the environment we occupy. Applying J. J. Gibson's (1986) framework 
for describing our visual environment—a field he called ecological 
optics—it is the surfaces within our environment that are the keys to 
understanding human visual perception. Light + the environmental surfaces 
which present themselves yields the ambient optical array—a term he coined 
to represent all the light rays that are arriving from all directions at a 
particular point in the environment, as structured in space and time. 
Gibson argues that surface texture is one of the fundamental visual 
properties of an object and it produces texture gradients that are very 
important, along with surface boundaries and cast shadows, to our judging 
of space and distance (Ware, 2000, p. 40). 

The Surfaces of Plants Affect How We See Them 
Plant surfaces are amazingly varied and complex: leaf microtextures, for 
example, can yield irregular patterns of reflection—causing both the 
amount and color of light to vary with ambient and source illumination 
angles, and with viewing angle. Illumination level variations, such as 
when the sun temporarily goes behind a cloud and then emerges, further 
complicates visual information processing. Digital images of plants 
contain much less information than is present in the ambient optical 
array, but they can be very useful when linked in a meaningful way with 
actual laboratory and field experiences (Wandersee & Schussler, 1999b). We 
think it prudent to note that, when viewing works of art, experts 
recommend limiting one's viewing of the images to no more than 1 hour per 
session, and to no more than 150 images in a single session to avoid 
visual processing fatigue (Berman, 2000). 

Some Visual Principles That May Help Explain Plant Blindness 
We continue to search the research literature to answer the question of 
why humans often overlook plants, as opposed to animals, and why they are 
often less interested in learning about and understanding plants than 
animals. In seeking a better explanation for plant blindness than biased 
learning approaches and gaps, we have compiled the following list of 
relevant principles of human visual perception and visual cognition 
(Wandersee & Schussler, 1999a). 

1. People typically tend to know less about plants than animals. Less than 
2.5% of the US population is directly involved in raising farm crops 
(Koning, 1994, p.7). Our research has shown us that persons who have had 
few meaningful and mindful educational and cultural experiences involving 
plants demonstrate little basis beyond popular culture for plant 
recognition. Humans can only recognize (visually) what they already know. 
Psychologists would say that plants have low signal value for many US 
citizens today. Mack and Rock (1998) have proposed what they call 
inattentional blindness, and they have found that once objects have 
acquired meaning for an observer, they are more likely to be consciously 
perceived. Inattention can become attention once an object or event has 
meaning. We often see what we expect to see, not what's actually 
there—because seeing involves not just the eye, but the eye-brain system 
(Solso, 1994, p. 31). 

2. When flowering plants are not flowering or possess inconspicuous 
flowers, the chromatic homogeneity, the spatial homogeneity, and the 
overlap of their green leaves makes edge-detection difficult. When the 
azaleas of the Deep South are not in bloom, they are perceived as quite 
non-descript bushes. When they are covered with red, 
pink, and white blossoms, no one can ignore them. Gopnik, Meltzof, and 
Kuhl (1999, p. 65) claim that: "Paying attention to edges is the best way 
of dividing a static picture into separate objects." Because green plants 
are typically static objects in the observer's field of view, seeing them 
and noticing them may pose much greater problems of visual detection than 
dynamic objects do. In addition, humans tend to get bored and habituate if 
they look at a relatively constant scene for too long a time (p. 27). If 
the members of a set of objects are not sufficiently distinct from their 
surroundings, they blend-in, and nothing is consciously perceived. We 
cannot visually label them and they do not "pop out" chromatically from 
their background. The visual cortex continuously filters out more of the 
data it receives from the retina of the eye than it retains for conscious 
analysis. Without our conscious intention, attention, and effort to 
preserve it, most of the visual data our brain receives about plants is 
likely to be discarded. 

3. The members of plant populations typically grow in close proximity to 
each other, whether cultivated or natural, and they rarely move (except in 
wind or rain). Static proximity is a visual cue that humans use to group 
objects into bulk visual categories (Zakia, 1997). Thus, individual plants 
may tend to be de-emphasized, with the totality being labeled simply as 
"plants." If there are animals, especially large ones, moving on this 
living environmental canvas, the animals may become the focus of our 
attention. This helps to explain the "plants as backdrop" phenomenon. When 
we watch a game of football, for example, we rarely think about the huge 
population of grass plants the players are moving upon. 

4. In most people's minds, plants are typically rather non-threatening 
elements of an ecosystem and incidental contact with them can usually be 
ignored without dire consequences. Visual habit and general familiarity 
diminish the conscious attention we give to such objects. If our vision 
operates to minimize expended energy, then low-priority-level attributes 
may be discarded to make visual processing easier. Human-eating plants do 
not exist, and we all know it. However, if we are warned that poison ivy 
may be present in the woods where we are walking, we are quick to develop 
and employ a template-like search image for compound leaves containing 
three leaflets in order to screen incoming visual data. In this case, the 
threat of bodily harm posed by its secondary plant substance, 
pentadecanedienyl catachol, makes the possible presence of this species in 
our path intensify our visual vigilance. 

5. The brain uses patterns of space, time, and color to structure visual 
experience (Zakia, 1997).  Because they are immobile autotrophs, plants 
generally offer fewer spacing-based, time-based, or color-based visual 
cues for humans to observe than animals do—except, for example, during 
periods of pollination and dispersal (cf. Wandersee & Schussler, 2000b). 
The brain is fundamentally a difference detector, and when it finds none, 
the perceptual field is not perturbed. For example, invasive plants, such 
as kudzu, capture our visual attention and interest because they grow with 
great vigor in places where we don't expect or want to see them. 

We have argued that, instead of invoking zoological biases as the root 
cause, there may well be a visual-cognitive-societal basis for why plants 
(and thus, the plant sciences) are frequently ignored or undervalued by 
the US public, under-represented in American biology courses, and 
considered less interesting than animals. Our research suggests that a 
keen interest in animals does not necessarily preclude an equal interest 
in plants, and vice versa. In fact, many botanists, including us, are pet 
owners. In querying students about the reasons they were more interested 
in learning about animals than plants, they responded that animals: (a) 
can move quickly via appendages; (b) have to eat regularly just as we do; 
(c) have human-like eyes for vision, (d) have human-like faces, (e) 
exhibit many interesting behaviors, (f) have dramatic and easily 
observable life cycles; (g) mate, give birth, and raise their offspring; 
and, (g) can interact with, and sometimes even play with, people 
(Wandersee, 1986). 

Plants Versus Animals 
Our own research studies (Wandersee, 1986; Wandersee & Schussler, 1998b) 
and that of other biology educators (Baird, Lazarowitz, & Allman, 1984) 
have found that, for the groups of school students that were studied, the 
majority of students (both girls and boys) preferred to study animals over 
plants. Our 1998 study of 274 US students drawn from grades 4-7 in a major 
metropolitan area indicated that: (a) student interest in animals led 
plants by approximately a 2:1 margin; (b) girls were more likely than boys 
to express an interest in learning about plants; and (c) of the nearly 300 
students we queried, only about 7% spontaneously expressed a scientific 
interest in plants—and of that 7%, about two-thirds were girls. 

The Dominance of Interest in Animals 
Paradoxically, plants form the basis of most animal habitats and all life 
on earth (Abbott, 1998). Although animals frequently steal the spotlight 
when the specter of extinction is raised, one in eight plant species is 
currently threatened by extinction. Intellectually, we may know that you 
can't sustain pandas without bamboo for them to eat, but culturally, facts 
like this are often forgotten (Abbott, 1998). Few American children's 
cartoon characters, shaped candies, stuffed toys, team mascots, songs, or 
games pay homage to plants rather than animals. Children in the US seem to 
be primarily "animal-socialized." 

Perhaps it's not just an American phenomenon, however. Visitors using the 
main entrance of the world's most famous botanic garden, the Royal Botanic 
Gardens—Kew (located near London) are greeted by The Kew Mural, a great 
and stunningly beautiful, intricately carved, wall-mounted, wood-relief 
sculpture depicting the Kew Gardens being assaulted by the powerful wind 
storm that struck down or damaged over 1,000 trees on 16 October 1987. The 
many kinds of wood used to make the sculpture came from actual timbers 
felled by the tempest; the interplay of natural colors, polished wood 
grains, flowing shapes, and visually palpable textures leave its viewer 
breathless. Yet, inexplicably, about two-thirds of the sculpture's surface 
area is devoted to images of animals being displaced by the storm. The 
plants depicted in it are rendered as either fragile or marginalized; the 
animals are central to the mural, and appear as either forceful opponents 
or agile survivors. Plants are clearly the backdrop of the visual tale 
being told. 

The Importance of Having a Plant Mentor 
In our two national studies covering 27 states (the first, looking at US 
"Generation Y" youth, and the second, at US mothers of young children) 
focusing on each demographic group's attention to, interest in, and 
understanding of plants—one of many interesting findings was that having 
early experiences in growing plants under the guidance of a knowledgeable 
and friendly adult was a good predictor of later attention to, interest 
in, and scientific understanding of plants, as well as of the kinds of 
plant experiences a young mother will provide for her children (Wandersee 
& Schussler, 2000a). 

Describing Plant Mentorship 
But the adult who serves as a plant mentor need not necessarily be the 
child's mother. Lewis (1996, p. xviii) writes: "I bonded with plants at an 
early age. As a small, curious boy, I once watched my grandmother crush a 
dried zinnia flower in her hand, then gently blow on the mixed pile of 
fragments. Petals and other chaff flew off, leaving tiny brown daggers on 
her palm. `Seeds to grow next year,' she said…I was awed and excited by 
the chance to practice this magic, and, with her guidance [emphasis 
added], soon started my own tiny garden." Your authors remember similar 
"magic moments" as budding plant scientists—one of us recalls an exciting, 
mentored, personal experiment during her 6th grade year, comparing the 
germination rates of pea seeds that she placed in a freezer for various 
intervals to pea seeds that were not frozen; the other recalls using a 
small vial of gibberellic acid, obtained from a local greenhouse by his 
father, in a supervised, personal attempt to grow giant bean plants (ala' 
Jack and the Beanstalk) for a school science project during his 5th grade 
year. 

A Possible Long-Term Solution to the Plant Blindness Problem 
Based on the evidence we have gathered to date, we hypothesize that early 
and iterative, well-planned, meaningful and mindful education (both 
scientific and social) about plants —coupled with a variety of personal, 
guided, direct experiences with growing plants—may be the best way to 
overcome what we currently see as the human "default condition"—plant 
blindness. 

Plants, Culture, and Plant Blindness 
We also postulate that the greater the degree of value a culture ascribes 
to plants, and the greater number of members within it who work directly 
with plants or plant products, the more likely the prevalence of plant 
blindness in that culture will be lower (cf. Balick & Cox, 1996). As 
Charles Lewis (1996, p. 22) contends, "Those who live by hunting or 
gathering, fishing or farming, must observe nature's signs….Changes in 
foliage color would be a strong indication that preparation for surviving 
the long winter should begin." 

In addition, Lewis (1996, p. 20) asks: "If dwellers in the savanna [of 
Africa] did use tree shapes and the visual appearance of the terrain for 
swift assessment of its potential as a habitat, could they not have 
evolved innate preferences for particular landscape characteristics 
(preferences that resonate within us today)? Investigators have found that 
Americans like park settings that might be characterized as `savannas'…." 
Research by Balling ( a psychologist) and Falk (an ecologist) found that 
younger school children (ages 8-11) who were shown slides of five 
different biomes expressed a significant preference for savanna-like 
settings, and later found that only after people grow older do they begin 
to select more varied landscapes—usually of the type familiar to them 
(1982). 

A Botanical "Sense of Place" 
Hollingsworth (2001) writes about the value of capturing one's sense of 
place photographically—via a close-up, a detail, a panorama, or a 
landscape scene that approximates a still- life painting of an importance 
site in one's personal history. At the beginning of a graduate seminar in 
botanical education, we also explored this idea, by asking the 
participating science instructors to prepare and then give brief, 5- to 
10-minute talks describing their own botanical sense of place—reflecting 
upon salient memories drawn from childhood days, and specifying several 
kinds of plants which grew in their yard or neighborhood that played a 
role in their life while they were growing up—and situating their hometown 
in its ecological and economic botany settings. It seemed to be a 
worthwhile exercise in self-discovery for them—realizing who their plant 
mentor was (if they had one); which plants they often used for play, for 
shelter, for scent, or for taste; what kind of bioregion they lived in; 
what kinds of area cash crops became familiar to them; and so forth. More 
importantly, it brought prior knowledge about and experiences with plants 
to the fore, and it provided accessible, conceptual anchor points for 
linking the new botanical knowledge they were learning to their existing 
knowledge structure about plants (Fisher, Wandersee, & Moody, 2000; 
Mintzes, Wandersee, & Novak, 1998, 2000). 

Some Activist Approaches We Are Trying 
"Prevent Plant Blindness." Those three simple words are emblazoned 
diagonally across our 20" x 30", bulletin-board-sized, full-color, 
classroom poster which is being distributed to more than 22,000 US science 
teachers and botany instructors as part of our national campaign to 
increase students' awareness of and interest in plants. We designed the 
poster to be initially puzzling, and to elicit inferences about its 
meaning. This aligns with Solso's (1994, p. 26) tenet drawn from visual 
cognition research which says "…we gaze longer at interesting or puzzling 
things…." The poster shows a tree-lined, riverine landscape. Hovering, 
Magritte-like, in the sky above is a large pair of dark-red-tinted 
glasses. The implication is that someone wearing those red glasses would 
not be able to see any of the green plants shown in the scene below—that 
if one's vision is "filtered," either physically or conceptually, one may 
actually miss seeing the plants that are present in one's environment. The 
back of the poster provides a complete definition of plant blindness, 
lists its symptoms, and offers directions for 20 simple, 
plant-science-related activities. This poster was subsequently endorsed by 
BSA's Education Committee. 

Besides the plant poster project, we have also written, illustrated, and 
published a 40-page children's science picture book which presents a plant 
mystery to children between the ages of 4 and 8 (Schussler & Wandersee, 
1999). It is intended to be the first of a series of mystery books 
involving the two main children's characters, who are portrayed as being 
best friends, namely—Abby and Tate. The first book subtly introduces its 
"readers" to some basic principles of plant care and encourages them to 
try raising an African Violet plant. We have introduced the book to a fair 
number of elementary teachers, parents, and grandparents, and have made it 
available at cost on Amazon.com. It has just been translated into Spanish 
by plant ecologist Sandra M. Guzman, and a Spanish version will be 
available in about six months. 

In addition, in 1998, we founded a science book award, now recognized by 
children's literature libraries and authors worldwide, called the Giverny 
Award. It is given each year to the author and illustrator of the book 
selected by the Award Committee as the best children's science picture 
book in our selection pool—with preference given to storybooks that teach 
plant science concepts and principles in an indirect and engaging way. 
Each year's winning book is described on our research group's web site (
http://www.15degreelab.com ) We hope that our annual book award, 
children's plant mystery books, classroom poster design and distribution, 
research publications, and regular presentations at selected, science 
teachers' and scientific society meetings will, at least in a small way, 
help increase the US public's awareness and interest in plants. 

Brief Closing Remarks 
If we are to liberate American students from the intellectual, perceptual, 
and visual processing traps that can lead to plant blindness, those of us 
who teach introductory biology and botany courses must work to expand our 
students' botanical horizons. While biological science departments may be 
currently reorganizing themselves along the lines of common research 
themes rather than taxa of organisms studied, plants stand as 
distinctively different life forms from humans, life forms that have, 
historically, rewarded our focused study, observation, and investigation. 
We think there are sound scientific reasons why botany, like the plants it 
studies, needs to maintain its own visibility and identity (Greenfield, 
[1955] 1999). 

In BSA's strategic plan, Botany for the Next Millennium (Niklas 1995, p. 
11) we read that, "Functionally, plants are the primary mediators between 
the physical and biological world." That is no minor feat; that role alone 
calls out to those who teach biology and botany to help "Prevent Plant 
Blindness." 

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Authors' Note: We have recently discovered that the adjective plant blind 
was used in the past within the British horticultural literature, in 
reference to plants that had lost their apical shoot tips—either by nature 
or by human intervention. However, its use is apparently quite uncommon in 
horticultural publications today, and, to the best of our knowledge, the 
term plant blindness has rarely been used in that literature. 

James H. Wandersee, Louisiana State University 
Elisabeth E. Schussler, Southeastern Natural Sciences Academy 

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