Success Story 01/10/2024

Brandon George, Kenton County Horticulture Extension Agent

Addressing Plant Awareness Disparity

On November 21, 2023, during the afternoon on a mild Autumn day, 24 students in grades 5^th-8^th participated in a lesson on seed dispersal and identification at St. Anthony Elementary in Taylor Mill, KY. In collaboration with 4-H Assistant Vanessa Sturgill who taught a lesson on seed dispersal mechanisms, I asked students if they could identify the species of plant according to its seed, the majority of which we collected from local native plants at the Kenton County Extension Arboretum. Most of the students were unable to identify the seeds by their species when seeing them in person. We followed this exercise by going outside and planting the seeds in their student garden and explaining how our native plants have dormancy conditions that must be met before germination begins and how nature provides the means for that to occur without human intervention. Looking beyond this, we plan on returning to observe what species have germinated in the garden by June 2024, and for the students to get a chance to observe the leaves of the young plants to try to identify them by their leaves. In addition, each student was given an assortment of the same plant species seeds to replicate this experiment at home for their own interest and learning opportunities.

The purpose of this program is to address the growing issue of plant awareness disparity (PAD), otherwise known as plant blindness, which signals a growing disconnect between humans and plants in their environment. “Plant awareness disparity (PAD, formerly plant blindness) is the idea that students tend not to notice or appreciate the plants in their environment. This phenomenon often leads to naïve points of view, such as plants are not important or do not do anything for humans. There are four components of PAD: attitude (not liking plants), attention (not noticing plants), knowledge (not understanding the importance of plants), and relative interest (finding animals more interesting than plants).” (Parsley, Daigle, Sabel)

As horticulture extension agents with the ability to tailor our programming to adults and children of all ages and socio-economic backgrounds, addressing PAD is extremely relevant to the continued efforts of plant conservation, which affects our direct relationship with the food we grow and eat locally as a means of local and sustainable agriculture. These efforts will likely play a growing role in the plan of work in Kenton County which has a growing population of urban dwellers that tends to have a disproportionately higher PAD compared to those living in rural communities.

Source

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9727616/#:~:text=Plant%20awareness%20disparity%20(PAD%2C%20formerly,not%20do%20anything%20for%20humans.