Botanists are disappearing – just when the world needs them most

21.08.2023 - 11:43 / theunconventionalgardener.com / guest

Header image: Annika Geijer-Simpson, Author provided

Sebastian Stroud, University of Leeds

Can you recall any of the plants you saw today?

Probably not. As a species, we are not programmed to recognise and register everything we see within our field of vision. This would be an overwhelming amount of information for our brains to process.

You can however, with a little time and practise, be trained to read the plants around you: to recognise which species they belong to and their names, their relationships with other organisms and what they are telling you about the environment they live in. This is to develop what some call a natural literacy.

Most people suffer from what is commonly known as “plant blindness”, a term coined by US botanists Elisabeth Schussler and James Wandersee. They described it as “the inability to see or notice the plants in one’s own environment”. Unless taught, people don’t tend to see plants – despite the fact that at any given moment, there is likely to be a plant – or something made by plants – nearby.

In our latest study, my fellow researchers and I found that people are not only less aware of plants through a lack of exposure and a loss of knowledge, but demand for an education in botany and opportunities to study it in the UK have diminished too.

Botany, once a compulsory component of many biology degrees and school programmes, is disappearing fast. It has been over a decade since a student was enrolled in a botany degree in the UK. We believe there has been a gradual erosion of knowledge about plants among biology graduates and the general public as a result.

We examined the number of UK students graduating across a variety of biological science programmes from 2007 to 2019 and found that students