Botanists worry about “Plant Awareness Disparity” – our tendency to overlook the plants around us. But in Spain’s Pyrenees mountains, Querol i Mercadé and colleagues found communities with deep plant connections. By studying their traditions and stories, the scientists hoped to discover how we might help everyone appreciate plants more.
They found that people with deep cultural connections to plants show very little Plant Awareness Disparity. These rural communities maintain strong emotional bonds with local plants, where they are not just resources but also part of their cultural identity and daily life. This suggests that emotional connections might be the key to helping people notice and value plants.
In these communities, plant awareness is maintained through rich traditions: 36 local sayings about plants, 53 personal stories of plant experiences, 27 community traditions, and 30 family customs involving plants. From seasonal celebrations to family recipes, plants are woven into the fabric of community life in ways that keep them visible and valued.
Querol i Mercadé and colleagues interviewed 22 local plant experts in Spain’s Alt Ter valley to find out how humans interacted with plants. They explored how plants feature in community traditions, family customs, and personal experiences. They also made a point of going beyond asking about practical plant uses, focussing on collecting stories, songs, and memories that show how people form emotional connections with plants.
The study is interesting because plant awareness is usually studied as Plant Awareness Disparity, a re-labelling of ‘plant blindness’. This has led to it being mostly studied in urban areas, where young people are increasingly disconnected from nature. Reframing the problem as plant awareness has allowed this research to take a different approach.
Instead of looking at what is lost, Querol i Mercadé and colleagues have learned from communities that maintain strong plant connections. Understanding how traditional knowledge and emotional bonds help people notice plants could lead to better ways of teaching plant awareness in schools and cities.
Querol i Mercadé, J., Fernandez-Llamazares, Á., Garnatje, T., Casadevall, A., Garet, A., & Gallois, S. (2024). Beyond plant awareness disparity: Exploring intangible relationships with plants in the Catalan Pyrenees. Plants, People, Planet. https://doi.org/10.1002/ppp3.10593 (OA)
