The summer season is a great time to get outside, and these two plant lovers want you to learn more while you’re doing it.
Jacob Suissa and Ben Goulet-Scott are the co-founders of Let’s Botanize, an educational nonprofit that teaches people about plants all around us. The two met while earning their PhDs at Harvard University in the department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology.
They spoke with Meteorologist Dave Epstein for GBH’s Morning Edition about their work and new book. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Dave Epstein: So for folks who may not be familiar with Let’s Botanize, talk a little bit about the format. What’s the experience of someone that finds Let’s Botanize?
Ben Goulet-Scott: Overall, our goal as an organization, everything we do, is just trying to spread curiosity about plants. We’re just trying to help people fall in love with plants the way that Jacob and I have. And the main thing, the way we got started and sort of the main way that people find us, is usually social media. We’re posting weekly videos and photo posts where we’re giving these little sort of teaching nuggets, trying to share something interesting about plants, hopefully always with a very inviting sort of feel that, ‘Hey, you could be noticing and enjoying the plant world just like this.’
And we’ve expanded a bit since the social media days. We wrote a book that just came out this year that’s trying to spread the way that we love to look and interact with plants, which is the hobby of botanizing. It’s a natural history hobby. It’s like birdwatching, but for plants. There’s no sort of end use in mind — you’re just looking at plants, enjoying them, being fascinated by them, and learning more about them.
Epstein: For someone that may just be taking a walk in the woods or walking their dog, or even just looking outside at their own yard, how would you invite them to begin this process of getting curious about what’s around them?
Jacob Suissa: So one thing we like to say is ‘Everyone’s a botanist, whether you know it or not.’ And that’s because we interact with plants all the time, right? From the wood in our furniture to slicing open a tomato or the food you eat. We’re interacting with plants all the time. So we’re actually quite familiar with essentially all the major botanical organs. In one salad you can interact with just about everything from roots to leaves to stems to — you name it. But really I think that the heart of botanizing and of course most other natural history hobbies is active observation. So careful observation, simply looking with intention is really where this all starts. And so it sort of bleeds into other aspects of mindfulness and slowing down in this chaotic world. But really, the biggest sort of thing to do to start is just to carefully observe. So often we use a tool called a hand lens. The hand lens is to the botanist as the binoculars are to the birder. And if you can sort of get a little magnifying glass, look at these plants in close detail, you can really get on their level and observe the minutia of these beautiful organisms.
Goulet-Scott: I’ll just add two things that we always like to highlight. One, plants won’t run away from you like a bird. So you can get really, really close — and make sure it’s not poison ivy or something covered in thorns before you get too close — but you can get so close to these organisms, which are really detailed, especially at a small scale. And that’s where the hand lens comes into play, is being able to magnify and just look close at a plant that’s not going to run away is an amazing experience.
And the other thing we like to highlight is rediscovering the familiar. So like Jacob said, we’re around plants all the time and it’s easy to kind of get too acclimated and take them for granted. But especially because they won’t run away from you, take a close look at a plant like a dandelion, which we take totally for granted. We step on top of them, we try to pull them out all the time. That is a beautiful organism. And if you get really close to that flower or the fruit structure, the white fluffy balls, they’re incredible structures. There’s something very fun about sort of re-sparking, reigniting an interest in something that we sort of get jaded about and take for granted. I have a 4-year-old daughter and she loves dandelions. I hope that lasts forever, but as we grow up, ‘It’s just a dandelion’ is a common sentiment. But you could rediscover how beautiful those are, even if you’re pulling them out of your yard.
Epstein: I want to play off what you just said, Ben, about your 4-year-old daughter, because for me as an educator as well, I think that getting kids involved with this at an early age is so critical because this is like birding. It’s a lifelong hobby that you can do your entire life. How would you approach it with maybe a preteen, a teen, even a high school or a college kid? How would you guide them to start this?
Suissa: I think the way to start is — well maybe to take a step back — whether it’s innate or however you want to put it, young people are inherently fascinated by little details, especially of the outside world, right? Ben can speak more to this with his two young kids. But I think it’s not so much an uphill battle maybe as it is with older people who have sort of been jaded, as Ben was saying, and moved away from this. But it’s almost like the ability to stoke the curiosity that’s already present, right? And again, I think it comes back to this active observation, looking at these fascinating plants in your yard and sort of guiding young people down that route.
Epstein: As kids are now getting out of school, we’ve got camps starting, people are going to be outside. We’ve got June, July, August, September — lots of changes. I mean, plants are, as you guys know, a lot of people don’t even realize the buds for next year are going to start being formed not that long from right now. It’s amazing how quickly that happens. If somebody picks up the book, how might you use it over the next several weeks through the summer? What would you do?
Suissa: There are many ways to interact with the book. So it’s 101 prompts broken into three sections. And there are images, macro photography of plants. There are some illustrations. There’s the prompt, which is an activity, and then there’s detailed text that explains aspects of plant development — morphology, physiology, ecology, evolution. And so you can interact with this and with plants at many different scales.
So one way to approach it — open up the book, find prompts that are interesting to you, or you can do them in order. So for instance: “can you find the veins in the petal of a flower?” is one prompt. So you can go out, look at the flowers in your garden and if you bought a bouquet and you’re in your house, and make these careful observations and just look at the plants. Just simply observe. And then you can sort of come back and read the prompts and read the text below and understand a little bit more about how petals evolved from leaves or other structures.
Ben and Jacob’s book is called “Let’s Botanize: 101 Ways to Connect with Plants”
