"Plant blindness" was coined as a term relating to the tendency to fail to notice plants in your environment, to view them as unimportant backdrop.
The tendency that concerns me the most is not this per se, but rather the inability to notice plants that comes from the inability to identify them, causing your brain to see the world in terms of "grass" surfaces, "weeds," "flowers" and "bushes" and "trees"
I can identify most wild plants I encounter on sight now—it's hard to even imagine how I lived differently.
The change is shocking. Learning to see plants was not just a matter of adding knowledge to my head, but creating totally new neural pathways. I believe my brain's capability for noticing and processing detail is profoundly increased. I can look much more closely at surfaces and objects and notice and be immediately drawn to small details.
The way I take photos is very different. When I look at outdoor photos from before I learned the plants, they are very broad and zoomed-out pictures of only the most obvious and unmissable features. It really appears like I was stumbling through the world almost blind, able to see big, obvious objects and nothing else.
And when I started learning to identify plants, oh, it was so painful, they all looked the same, and I couldn't even see the small details that set them apart! And there were no good resources or guides! I was fighting for my life!
And it's normal, that's the wild thing, most people go through life not being able to name the common plants that are all around them. This thought is scary and alien to me now, but a couple years ago I was entirely aware of my ignorance and felt no need to fix it. I didn't even know what the trees in my backyard were and I had lived here for 10 years and I wasn't troubled by it.
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