myEighteen months ago, I adopted a dog. Now I hit the streets of Brooklyn with my mutt for at least an hour a day, walking and wrestling with his discarded chicken bones. You notice a lot of things when you visit the same blocks over and over: which avenues are the quietest, or when the rusting scaffolding around a nearby building disappears overnight.
My favorite thing to do is admire the greenery in the neighborhood. I’m a sucker for spring-blooming tulips, peonies, and dogwoods. However, I soon realized how limited my plant vocabulary was. Yes, I knew what a silver birch was because of its papery bark. But what was that taller, brighter, menacing tree, or that pale bush with tiny, ornate leaves? I grew up in Australia, where the vegetation is quite different from that in the American northeast, and I hadn’t really made an effort to learn about the locals. It seemed disrespectful, to say the least.
Searching Google for phrases like “common trees in New York City” and “difference between basswood and linden wood” (A somewhat tricky questionBy the way), I found what is now one of my favorite things on the Internet: the New York City Tree MapThe map contains information on every tree managed by New York City’s parks department (there are 875,428). All you have to do is type in its location and voila: you now know it’s a London plane tree, one of many that protect you from the summer sun.
Still, the map had limitations. For example, it couldn’t tell me what that orange wildflower stretching across my neighbor’s fence was, since it wasn’t a tree, obviously, and it wasn’t on public land.
Enter plant-identification apps. Friends recommended PictureThis ($39.99 a year), which they found easy to use and accurate; it also tells you when to water and how to care for your plants, a nice perk for those with a green thumb. But I started with PlantNet, a free tool described on its website as a “citizen science platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to facilitate plant species identification and inventory.” It was easy to use: Just snap a photo of unfamiliar flora and let the technology do its work.
Soon I was pointing out and touching Japanese pagoda trees, toothed oaks, and Callery pear trees. I found it useful in my own home, too. That houseplant I’d been calling “great” for five years? Turns out I’m the proud owner of a tree philodendron.
Don’t get me wrong: seeing, touching and smelling a plant are rewards in themselves. But it was incredibly satisfying to know that that young tree with spade-shaped leaves edged in vibrant pink was, poetically, a copper leaf; the marijuana-like stems poking out from between the paving tiles were mugwort, not just “a weed.”
According to Pierre Bonnet, a botanist and project coordinator at PlantNet, the app is available in 40 languages and has 25 million users a year. In addition to casual hobbyists like me, professionals in the education, environmental and agricultural sectors use the platform and the information submitted by users in their daily work; for example, Bonnet says that more than 700 scientific publications have used PlantNet data.
Bonnet says PlantNet helps change people’s experience of the natural environment. He introduced me to the concept of plant blindness (which some experts have called name change proposaldue to the ableism of the term). In 1999, botanists James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler coined the term in a passionate editorial on people’s inability to appreciate plants and their general importance “in the biosphere and in human affairs.”
Bonnet hopes that PlantNet will help change people’s insensitivity to plant life. “The fact that they can see diversity, because they can name it, is not just a green wall; it starts to be much more precise,” he says. “We are quite convinced that people who are aware of their environment will be much more efficient at managing it and, ideally, protecting it.”
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For me, at least, becoming more curious about plant life is as revealing and expansive as learning a language. It’s a calming, proactive way of being in the world: When I peer closely at the hidden geometry of a flower or brush my paintbrush between overhanging leaves, I feel grateful and grounded. It makes me think of artist and writer Jenny Odell speaking at a 2017 design conference about Sitting in a rose garden and doing nothing“Even though I felt a little guilty about how incongruous it seemed – a beautiful garden versus a terrifying world – it really felt necessary, like a survival tactic.”
I can’t say I’m a plant fanatic, unlike, say, Judi Dench, who once did a TV special called My Passion for Trees. But there’s a lot more I want to know. I’d heard that the Brooklyn Botanic Garden offers horticulture classes For anyone curious about greenery: If you wanted to, you could learn botany, plant care, or how to plant a rooftop garden.
“It’s really nice to be able to start being a little bit more systematic about it and understanding family traits, like plant families,” says Erin Eck, the botanical garden’s director of continuing education. “It’s a way for people to deepen their connection to the outdoors and the natural world.”
Even just slowing down and making observations has its benefits. “If you look under the leaves and in the cracks in the bark, you’ll start to notice things,” Eck says. “You’ll start to notice patterns; you’ll start to notice differences.”
I feel warm and happy when I see a favorite cedar or a glorious wave of magnolias. I didn’t have to do anything to deserve their beauty, and I expect nothing from them except their presence. They bring familiarity and texture to my day, but they may not look the same in a few hours or a week—a reminder of how everything changes.
“We seem to believe that unless we’re riding a roller coaster or making out with someone on the beach or doing whatever else would happen in a toothpaste commercial, life is mediocre,” writes Swan Huntley in her irreverent anti-self-help book, You’re Grounded. “Now I’m going to solve all your problems in one statement: If you pay attention to the details, then nothing will ever be mediocre again.”
