Plant Blindness Transcript

Did you know that Boulder County has homed over 1,600 native plant species? In the whole state of Colorado, there are about 3,200 native plant species. That means we have half of all the native plant species here in our own backyard. The reason for this is the Rocky Mountains. When they got pushed up from that ancient seabed, they created our front range elevation gradient, or a steep difference between the plains and the farmlands in eastern Boulder County and the high elevations found on the western side of Boulder County, like Long's Peak and the Indian Peak Wilderness, where they reach 13, even 14,000 feet into the sky. This means we have a lot of different ecosystems in our county, from grasslands to tundra, scrunched together in less than 40 miles. However, when you think about Boulder County Parks & Open Space and our amazing natural environment, what comes to your mind? Do you think of a moose you once saw at Caribou Ranch? Or what about the tracks you saw in the mud? Did they have claws? Was that a mountain lion? Or what about that bald eagle you saw soaring overhead? When walking through a forest, we listen to birds. But what about the plants that make up that forest? How often do you remember that little purple flower you saw? Or what about that flowering sunflower that brushed against you as you rode your bike on the regional trail? Is that sunflower native? Should it be there? What value does that flower have to me? To the land along the trail? To the insects buzzing around? And to the whole ecosystem in Boulder County? Well, we are going to look at a concept many of you have never heard of. It's called plant blindness. No, it's not blind plants. Do plants see anyway? We'll leave that for a future episode. Today, we are going to learn what that term means, why it matters, and how we can overcome this. For this episode, I have three guests that have spent their careers studying, understanding, and managing plants. They do this as staff members of Boulder County Parks & Open Spaces Plant Ecology Working Group. They are part of a team of experts that make sure we, as public land managers, aren't blind to plants. They'll give you details of this concept and explain why we all need to be more plant aware, to see plants for their immense value, and take steps to open our eyes to the wonderful world of plants. I'm Therese Glowacki, the Director of Boulder County Parks & Open Space, and I'll be your host for this episode on plant blindness. My three guests are David Hirt, Senior Plant Ecologist who's been with Boulder County Parks & Open Space for over 28 years. We also have Carrie Cimo. She is a Plant Ecologist who also manages our volunteer program. She's been with us for 11 years. And Brad Winckelmann. Brad is also a Plant Ecologist who has worked on many vegetation projects with us. In the six years he's been here, he also has a broad experience on different vegetation types across the West. So Brad, I'm going to start with you. This was your idea. Can you start off by explaining what is plant blindness?

Plant blindness is our tendency as people to overlook plants in our natural environment. And it doesn't just refer to an inability to recognize and identify all the plants that we see, but it generally speaks to our underappreciation of the ecological importance and the conservation importance that plants have in our environment. You alluded to some examples in your introduction, but let's say we were hiking one of our trails on one of our open space properties. If you're walking around, you might notice the wildlife. You might notice an elk or bald eagle flying by. You might also notice other people walking and maybe they have their pets with them. Or you might notice cars driving in the distance back down in the plains. But you may not notice and pay much attention to all the plants and the vegetation that you're seeing. So plant blindness is sort of rooted in this cognitive bias we have towards things that we perceive to be more alive or noteworthy in our environment. And there's sort of two places that this comes from. One is sort of a physiological bias. So if you think of the course of human evolution, we have basically become more attuned to things that maybe we perceive to be a threat, like a predator hunting us. Or we might notice game animals moving by that we might look at as a food opportunity. But everything else kind of becomes background. All the plants, all the non-moving objects. We notice things that move. We notice things that make sound, pay attention to threats and opportunities. And everything else sort of just blends as this green background, essentially. But then also just thinking of our visual processing. When we're looking out in the distance, there's so much information that we could perceive and would simply be overwhelming for us to acknowledge and mentally record each and everything we notice unless we're actively thinking about it. Part of that is physiological and then the other part of plant blindness is cultural. People today, especially in urban environments, where plants may not have a very obvious role in everyday life, we sort of discount plants and don't think of them. Of course, they are very important, but not perceptively. So, you know, in popular culture too, thinking of even in nature documentaries, those documentaries usually are about wildlife, wildlife interactions. In higher education, there are fewer plant related courses and plant related degrees than there are wildlife degrees, like thinking of game management and wildlife biology. So plant blindness is just a result of these cultural and physiological phenomenons. And so what we try to do in Boulder County is think of where we might be short sighted in terms of plant blindness and try to pick up the slack and make up for that in what we do in our Plant Ecology Work Group.

Well that's a great description. And I say I am certainly guilty of that. Because you know, you're looking at the flitting bird. But I had never known that, well, it's either because what might have been in my background, something moving behind could be a predator, or I might be looking at my next meal. So putting it into the, you know, caveman like context, I think really helps us understand why we're drawn more to animals, that's for sure. How about you Carrie? Why are animals more linked to our ethos of conservation?

Like Brad alluded to, there's certainly an evolutionary connection, maybe at the heart of some of these choices in the poster children for conservation. Humans are animals after all. Like one might feel a closer kinship to a sister or a brother. Maybe we feel a closer kinship to other animal species because we're more closely related on that evolutionary tree of life. When we feel that deep sense of connection, kinship, relationship, perhaps we're more driven to make effort to conserve those species. Brad also mentioned desensitization, and I think this is also true for the choosing of the faces of conservation. Where we see plants all the time, sometimes they become the background. They're in our backyards, they're at work, they're on our window sills. And this is maybe even true for common animal species. A squirrel or a chickadee might not peak your interest, like it would if you saw a bear, or a big cat, or a mountain goat. This tendency to evoke emotion and incite action, perhaps is linked to our evolutionary connection animal to animal. I think generally it's also harder for people to have that kind of relationship and kinship feeling with plants, because plants don't share the human-like characteristics that we have, like eyes, ears, furs, or family units. Further, I think it's an interesting observation. As a whole, humans have assigned the word wildlife to include only animals, generally speaking. Plants are life, plants are in the wild, so are they not wildlife as well? And while some folks might say plant life when referring to plant communities on the landscape, I think we most often hear terms like plants and wildlife when describing or talking about the natural world. And so perhaps by separating plants from this concept of life, we inherently value them less than we do animals, and thus we choose them less often or not at all when we are looking to champion a conservation effort.

So David, can you give us a couple of examples that let's demonstrate how we prioritize animals over plants in our everyday lives?

One of the first things that comes to mind that probably most listeners can relate to is sports teams. You know, we have the CSU Rams, we have CU Buffs, we have Seahawks, Dolphins, and you know, you don't see sports teams with mascots that are plant related.

There's one that I know of, the College of Environmental Science and Forestry in New York State, their mascot is Oakey, the acorn.

That's a great story. That's a mascot I could get behind. Carrie alluded to, you know, plants could be deemed wildlife. Most states, I think, maybe all states have a wildlife agency, but plants is kind of absent from that name. We have Colorado Parks and Wildlife. And that's not to say that those organizations, those agencies don't manage plants or concern themselves with plants, they do. California's department has dedicated botanist and vegetation managers. They even have a law enforcement arm that deals with plant poaching, which is pretty unique. I think Florida might have that as well. And Colorado Parks and Wildlife, I think, has people, at least one staff person devoted to plants. 2015, they came out with their State Wildlife Action Plan, which was kind of their visioning document about how to manage wildlife into the future and especially species that are of concern. And there was no mention of plants anywhere in that document.

That was 2015?

2015.

That's not that long ago.

No.

They made some improvements in 2020. They did a revision and they included a whole appendix of plants. And the same thing, plant species across the state that they knew were threatened or required some protection or preservation or monitoring. So that was a step in the right direction. And then I heard 2025 this year. Now they've incorporated plants throughout the document. So they're starting to elevate them maybe on peer with wildlife species. So that's an improvement. Federally, I think this is quite interesting. You know, people think Federal T&E, Threatened and Endangered Species Act, treats everything the same and it doesn't. It treats animals very differently than plants. Animals under the federal rules are protected on all lands, federal lands, state lands, private property. Plants are not. Plants are only protected on federal land, or if your project uses federal funding. And that goes back to the beginning of that law in 1973. And they passed it. And I think, you know, they thought there's parts in there about commerce and things and animals cross boundaries, right? So the federal government had more jurisdiction over animals because they might occur on federal land and cross into your private property or into state land or other things. Plants don't. They stay put. And so if they weren't on federal land, the federal government didn't want to get into the habit of, you know, legislating what's on your private property to that detail. The funding that the feds have, I think I heard it was in 2020, is $1.2 billion for the Endangered Species Act. And even though plants comprise 40% of the listed species, they only get 2% of that funding, much less on par with the wildlife. As an aside, two-thirds of that money went to just two species. And I don't know if anybody knows what two of those were.

I think they were fish.

Yeah, you're right. It's salmon and steelhead in the three western states. Many people might guess wolves, but I guess they're a bargain because they don't take nearly as much money as the salmon do.

So why do you think the salmon and steelhead take up so much of our endangered species' focus?

I think they're a really good totem animal for the west coast especially. There's a lot of big indigenous relationship with salmon. They're obviously food. Most people know them as food. A lot of the effort to restore their habitat is just expensive. You know, dam removal is a big, big cost. Fish passage projects, these large scale river restoration projects, and they've been on the list for many, many years. They've had a lot of focus from a lot of different agencies.

I think that's a remarkable statistic that only 2% of our funding is spent on plants. Yeah, that's something that we can all hope will change in the future, kind of like the Colorado State Conservation Plan. What I'd like to know is what are the values that plants give us that we could lose? What values would we lose if we really keep up this plant blindness, if we focus on animals versus plants and their roles in the ecosystem?

Without plant life, there certainly would be no animal life, including human life. Plants provide essential services to us, like providing oxygen that humans and all other animals need to thrive. Plants also help with water filtration and ensuring that we have clean water to drink and use in our lives. Plants have created the foundation for medicinal advancement and medicinal uses. Many modern medicines were developed from plant compounds, and more are being discovered and researched all the time. Plants also make up a huge portion of our diet. Since the dawn of human history, plants have been of utmost importance, notably cereal plants, the grasses, some of those being the most overlooked in our lives today, but yet are the most important food source that we have. Those grains and those that flower. Plants also provide habitat for animals, including humans, not only by way of lumber, but also through our need for their presence. I really resonate, and I might speak for others, with the theory of biophilia, this deep-rooted and innate connection that we have through that evolutionary connection we have with the natural world and particularly plants. I invite you to close your eyes for a second and try to imagine a world without any plants, or a place to live without any plants, and what a devoid and stressful place that could be. Plants give you fresh air, they help you reduce your stress levels, reduce anxiety. There's even studies that indicate the presence of plants help to increase your creativity and your productivity, boosting your mood and your general satisfaction in life. And when we undervalue plants and their positive impact, we are really doing ourselves a disservice, and our well-being and our happiness is impacted.

I think that is very true. And I think any of us who live in Boulder County and get a chance to go out walking on our trails, understand that our stress goes down when we're surrounded by trees and that our well-being certainly is enhanced. You put a little smile on your face, your thoughts can filter through all that good plant energy surrounding us when we're out there in open space.

We all need good plant energy.

We do. So Brad, how about if you can give us a little more or some other kind of detriments to being blind to plants?

The most obvious thing that we would lose is our plant biodiversity. Losing individual species, losing vegetation communities or ecosystems if we aren't careful to conserve our plants at the individual species level. I think Carrie was really right to emphasize all of that, just the importance of biodiversity and what it does for us as people. Biodiversity is the engine of ecological function. It enables resilience, it fuels evolution, it sustains ecological health and it shapes our physical systems, our atmosphere, our hydrology, climate regulation, biodiversity, plant biodiversity, does all these things. We want to protect those species because once we lose one species after another, it will have a cascading effect eventually and we will really see the consequences of it. Even losing a single species can affect the food web. There's individual insect species or mammal species or what have you that are dependent on individual plant species. There's all these really unique relationships that exist. David earlier was talking about how at the federal level, there's such a disparity of the number of plants that are on the endangered species list and the funding that they get. At the local level, we tried to compensate for some of that. There's some local conservation organizations that are really trying to bridge that gap. So our local Colorado Natural Heritage Program helps in this endeavor. They have identified over 100 individual plant species in Boulder County that are imperiled. That's about 6% of all plants known to Boulder County right now. Over 100 are imperiled. And then another 55 vegetation communities are imperiled. Vegetation communities being unique assemblages of plants where maybe the individual species aren't rare, but composition of that plant community is quite unique for that area. There's 55 of those communities that are imperiled. Organizations like the CNHP Colorado Natural Heritage Program, they do their best to foster research into this and have grants to monitor these rare plant populations. At Boulder County, we use that information to try to look out for these plant species for these vegetation communities. With plant blindness, we're at risk for losing some of that. The question is sort of framed, well, what are we going to lose if we sort of submit to this concept of plant blindness? It's kind of an anthropocentric view of it, but I would also argue that there is intrinsic value of plant biodiversity itself. I mean, just looking out into the landscape, looking at a beautiful vista, what you're seeing is a result of billions of years of evolution, its manifestation into endless forms of life. And I think there's just something so beautiful about that. It's less of a tangible thing. I kind of liken it to the idea of trying to convince someone that art is important or music is important. We can live without it technically, but it enriches our lives. It's part of our shared lived experience and part of our history, and it's worth protecting.

So I have a question. You brought up two different things. One is plants that have an animal that's associated with it, or maybe in twisting it into the animal specific, our animal specific lens, we have animals that are just affiliated with one plant. I know one that we think about often is the monarch butterfly and the milkweed plant. That's why it's general knowledge. I would say a lot of people are trying to preserve monarch butterflies. We have them here in Boulder County. Even on our open space, we're trying to preserve big patches of milkweed. Is there another example, something that people might not have heard about, where an insect or an animal is reliant on one particular plant for a primary part of its life?

Yeah, I think there are so many examples. One that I know David wrote about recently was this yucca moth we have here in Boulder County. There's many species of yucca in the United States, and they all have an individual moth species that is responsible for the pollination of those plants. And without the yucca moth, our local yucca, the soapweed yucca, it wouldn't get pollinated without this moth. And then the moth in turn, it lies its eggs in the capsules of the yucca fruit. And so it's a mutualistic relationship that both benefit. And without either of these species, the other would become extinct. I mean, there's a lot of relationships. We have stickweed plants in the mancilla genus that have a unique relationship with ants. And without one, the other wouldn't exist, or the other would struggle, at the very least. There's lots of parasitoid wasps that try to lie their eggs in insect larvae that burrow in specific species of trees. And without those trees, we wouldn't have those insects laying their larvae. We wouldn't have those insects ovipositing their larvae into these trees. And we wouldn't have wasps parasitizing these insects. So everything's really connected.

Well, and so interdependent. I mean, so specific. If you have one insect and one plant, if either one of that equation disappears, then that whole system falls apart.

And you may not notice it at first, but I think in the United States, we have maybe, I think, an average of 2.3 plant species becoming extinct every year. You know, we're just chipping away at it, and eventually it'll become much more obvious, I think.

Yeah, the other thing that you talked about with the biodiversity is just how we are trying to mimic biodiversity as we advance our agricultural practices. Rather than having a mono crop, we're talking more about intermixing plants and having the edges of farms, house plants that maybe provide habitat for pollinators. To your point of how important biodiversity is, I think the more of us that know and understand that, the more we can bring it into the broader culture of humans, and for example, how we provide our food. Can we get more plant diversity, make our agriculture more sustainable by using the systems we see in nature into our cultivated world?

You know, a good example of that in our Boulder County program could be our native seed garden, where we are growing various plants, about nine or ten different species each year, of our local genetically adapted native plants on the edge of an organic farm field, located right along the LoBo Trail. And we grow those plants to harvest seed for restoration efforts, but undoubtedly our little seed garden is connected to the larger farm field and helping the pollination efforts through that operation.

That's a great example. And you can see it if you're out on the LoBo Trail, just south of Longmont, especially in the spring.

That's right. Beautiful time.

It is. It's buzzing, buzzing, buzzing with pollinators out there. Surely, not everyone is blind to plants. David, can I start with you? And can you give us an example of where people aren't blind to plants? Or put another way, what plants would we consider charismatic megaflora?

Yeah, there are certainly plants, individuals and maybe whole species that people would consider this charismatic megaflora. Trees, I think people are much more attuned to than grasses. So in our realm, that could be cottonwood trees, that could be aspen, ponderosa pines, ones that aesthetically look pleasing to the eye. They're long lived, so people form a relationship with them over time if they visit the same area over and over again. Like leaf peeping in the fall for the aspen has become almost bigger than going up to the mountains in the summer. I mean, it is really, that's probably the best example of people really being attuned to plants for this brief period in the fall all over the country at various times. So that's a great example. And then I think also, you know, Brad mentioned like the plants are kind of background and certainly, you know, fields of green are backgrounds. But if you have an individual pop of color among that green, you're going to notice that too, right? So if you're walking through the woods, you might notice, oh, this bright red Indian paintbrush or the Colorado blue columbine, you know, individual plants like that. I think people can certainly relate to and notice and take that experience home with them.

And are celebrated sometimes. The Wildflower Festival in Crested Butte every year is a big draw and a great opportunity for people to appreciate the plant life out there.

And we all have state wildflowers. Every state in the country has one. Like you mentioned, the blue columbine gives us a little opening into charismatic mega flora. Brad, how about, can you tell us a little bit about what other kind of showy flowers catch your eye when you're out there?

There are a bunch of good examples. Some of them are so fleeting too in the summer. I'm thinking of one of our lily plants, our woodlily, which is a bright orange flower, quite common in the eastern United States, but out here in Colorado, it's actually ranked by the Colorado Natural Heritage Program as being a vulnerable plant. It's so vivid and stands in such contrast against a green background. There are penstemen of bright purple colors. In the plains, we have the blanket flower, this red and yellow flower that seems to flower all summer. Those are just a few examples of things that are kind of ubiquitous actually, but they certainly stand out quite a bit, even if they may not be megaflora in terms of their size, like a lot of our tree species, but they're very notable and I think people certainly notice those wild flowers.

So we also have a very big important tree on our open space. David, do you want to tell us a little bit about the cottonwood tree?

This is a great story and many people might not be familiar with it because it's kind of been about 12 years since it kind of transpired. Back I think in the late 90s, Boulder County purchased some property in the Hygiene Area and on that property was a huge, huge cottonwood tree. Even at that time, it was designated as a champion tree and there are state champion trees and there are national champions. That's kind of based on the tree's height, the crown spread and the circumference of the trunk. They give that a score, kind of similar to what hunters have with trophy elk and deer antlers. So this tree on the hygiene property was not only a state champion, it was a national champion. And I remember it was commemorated on a poster even with other national champion trees, like a redwood and a doug fir and others. And it was a champion, I think, since 1964. So it had already been a champion for quite a while. When we got it, we built a little spur trail out to it and put an interpretive sign up so people could go view it. At that time, it was kind of at the tail end of its life. It had been there a while. It was a big old tree, starting to die back, started to lose some branches. There was an incident with a fire that some people started accidentally or purposely or accidentally down at the trunk. Hygiene Fire, Volunteer Fire Department, helped put that out, but it kind of lost another limb. Our department decided, you know, we didn't want to just cut this thing down, say like, oh, it's old, let's cut it down because it's a safety risk. So we did do some measures for public safety, put up a fence, prevented people from getting close to it, but we thought we would just let it die a dignified death if it was going out. Oh, and I should say, you know, this tree was, it was like 105 feet tall, over 100 feet across, and the circumference was 36 feet, almost 12 feet in diameter. So it took a lot of people holding hands just to get around this tree. It's pretty impressive. We also thought, hey, you know, this is a champion cottonwood tree. Maybe we should do something to preserve these genetics of this tree and keep its life going. So one of our foresters went up in the tree to collect some live tissue stems. And cottonwoods, like willows, are pretty easy to clone. So it's a pretty simple process and pretty successful. But we weren't able to find great material on this old tree. And next to it were some younger trees that looked very similar to this old tree. They were still large, but they also had these big burrows. The champion tree had all these big burrows on it. And these young trees had very similar burrows, which is unusual for a young tree. So we thought, are these related to the champion or not? They had lots of live material. We took some of that material. We sent it all to a lab, and they did some genetic testing on it. And they came back, and the good news was, they were like, yes, these younger trees are related to the champion tree. And so we're like, that's great. We got material to use. And then they said, oh, and by the way, this tree isn't really a plains cottonwood. It's a hybrid cottonwood. And we're like, hmm, nobody quite knew that all these years. And the trick there was, and we have two cottonwoods in Boulder County. There's a plains cottonwood that occurs out on the plains. And then we have a narrowleaf cottonwood that grows up from 9,000 feet down. And they kind of overlap in that hygiene area, western part of the plains in Boulder County. Hybrids are more vigorous by nature. That's why a lot of our agricultural crops are hybrids. So the thing here was hybrids are disqualified from being champion trees. You're not allowed to be a champion tree if you're a hybrid. So all these years, almost 45 plus years, this tree had been a champion. It really shouldn't have been. And there was quite a little scandal this, and it got out on the internet, and as much as arborists can get into a scandal, it was kind of odd. And people, it was nice because people on the internet related to it. Oh, I visited that tree, and I should have known. I should have looked at the leaves, because the leaves do look different on a hybrid cottonwood. And they said, but I was just so taken by the trunk. I'm looking at the trunk, I never looked up, you know. That was kind of the interesting twist to that story. The good news is we were able to collect that material. We I think Colorado State University Nursery helped us grow them out. We ended up with a few dozen of these trees. We planted some on Crane Hollow Road area. There's one at Pella Crossing. There's one at the Fairgrounds. There's one at Left Hand Valley Grange in Niwot. And we gave some out to other places. So I think there's one at Hygiene Elementary, one at Jamestown Town Park, and probably some various other places. So they called it the Gentle Giant. The Gentle Giant continues to survive in new form. Oh, and we also, if you recall, we took down that big branch that fell off after the fire. And these branches are like the size of a huge, full cottonwood tree. And we took that material and we donated it to local woodworkers. And those local woodworkers turned that wood into bowls and sculptures and furniture. And then we used that, they sold that as a fundraiser for the park. So it also lives on in that regard, too. So it's a good story.

Oh, that's a great story. I know that champion tree, it just struck you when you saw it, the girth of it. The platform we had there was kind of looking down because it was down right near an irrigation ditch, which probably also helped it really survive for, you know, 150 years or longer and made it so big. Even if it wasn't a champion on the national list, it's a champion in our hearts. And it's great. It's great to know that that same genetics is out there throughout the community in Boulder County. I think that's a wonderful story. What I'd like to turn the question to now is, how did you all first see plants? You know, in our storybooks to our children, we often have the stories of Bambi and the other animals. So where was it in your lives that you first were drawn to plants? Carrie, you want to start?

Well, like many of us, I moved to Colorado from elsewhere as an adult. As a young person, I grew up in the woods and the creeks of Western New York. I grew up south of Buffalo. That's where I really started developing my relationship with the more than human world, the natural world of my backyard. It was in community college that I was trying to figure out what my steps in life were going to look like, and I realized, wait, I can get paid for being outside? That's what I do when I have extra time on my hands. So I shifted from an education path to biology path, and I went to the College of Environmental Science and Forestry, a state university of New York in Syracuse, and I began as a wildlife biology major, actually, attracted to that charismatic megafauna like many of us are. And through some coursework, it felt a little bit too population management for me, at least the coursework that I was taking at the time. And so I decided to shift my major into conservation biology, and that was the first crack in the door opening my eyes to the incredible world of plants and their adaptations that they have in various environments across the planet. I began getting fieldwork experience. I started out in New York State doing wetland delineations in which you have to learn how to read the landscape based on the plant life. So I learned how to identify plants. I learned where they typically existed, and we learned to demarcate that boundary of a wetland. And from that position, I got more well-versed in plant identification. That led to another seasonal plant job and another seasonal plant job. And fast forward, I graduated college and I'm looking for jobs all over. And lucky me, I landed in Colorado. So then I worked with Open Space & Mountain Parks in the city of Boulder for a few seasons and was lucky enough to get a job here with Boulder County Parks & Open Space working with plants. I love plants for so many reasons, as we've heard so far. But one in particular is they really encourage you to slow down in the landscape. Sometimes, it takes that slowing down and taking a beat in your day to really stop and appreciate something. The phrase is stop and smell the flowers. And one of my favorite plants that occurs up in the subalpine alpine is called elephant heads. That was one of the first flowers I fell in love with in Colorado. Particularly because you have to get down to the plants level to really see and appreciate it. Each individual flower in that whole flower head looks like an elephant, a beautiful purple silky elephant. It's so amazing to see that structure and it's easy to overlook. You could just be trotting along on the trail, looking at the mountains, which of course are beautiful. But it's not until you really slow down and take a minute to really be in the present and appreciating these plants.

That's a great example. Elephant heads, I mean, like how did that happen? How did a flower look exactly like an elephant?

It's amazing.

It is amazing. That's a great, a great example. How about you, Brad? What opened your eyes to plants?

You know, Carrie and I must have had different professors at SUNY ESF because I was not too excited about plants by the time I left.

Oh, too bad.

So for dendrology, we had a dendrology class. I really loved that. Carrie and I went to the same school, not at the same time, but after I graduated from SUNY ESF, I took a job in the southwestern United States, in the Mojave and Sonoran deserts. Quite a different environment than in upstate New York. A lot of people refer to the desert as the wasteland, and you know, there's just no life out there. There's nothing going on. But that couldn't be farther from the truth. There is just so much biodiversity. I worked for Joshua Tree National Park. In the park alone, there were over 800 unique species of plants. There's remarkable diversity there. And something many of the plants had in common was just their unique adaptations to the harsh desert environments, which they need to survive. Things like plants not having leaves for most of the year. Small, tiny leaves. All the flowers are usually small and papery, very resistant to desiccation. There are plants like the Palo Verde tree, which photosynthesizes through its bark. There's this Acatillo plant, which only leaves out briefly after rainfall, and then the leaves quickly senesce and fall down. There are just so many unique strategies for survival in the desert. Plants there have spikes. They're thorny. They are often not much to look at. They look very unappealing, but they survive. They have to respect them for that. Another adaptation common to plants in the Southwest is this Crestulation Acid Metabolism photosynthesis, or CAM photosynthesis, where plants perform gas exchange during the evening when there's no sunlight. And this is unlike many other plants in the United States. The reason they do that is it prevents water loss by performing that gas exchange during the evening as opposed to during the day. Here in the Arid Plains, we have some plants that do the same thing. It's common in stone crops, succulents, cacti, but it's very notable down there. Just these unique adaptations to survive in the harsh climate. I also became really interested, really restricted geographic ranges of specific plant species. There are all sorts of edaphic endemics, which means plants that are relegated just to specific soil types. They can only survive in certain soil types. There are a lot of plants in California that are edaphic endemics that are restricted just to unique soil types. Just really unique adaptations where plants are best suited to their environment was just something that really opened my eyes to just how incredible plants are. And that's when I really started paying attention.

Yeah, well, the Southwest is really full of fascinating plants. An example that I have heard about where here in Boulder County, so typically we're more arid here and Big Bluestem is a tall grass species. And so you think of Big Bluestem as growing more in an area that has a lot more rainfall. But here in Boulder County, because of the specific climate created by the front range, it gets more rain there. And we have the Big Bluestem that thrive right along the front range here in Boulder County. And that's always fascinated me that a plant that might be widespread in other parts of the country are unique in back to that elevation gradient in Boulder County because we have so many different elevations and different rainfall at each of those that you can have plants that are adapted like that. It's unique down in the southwest, but even in Boulder County, we have very unique adaptations of our plants here. So how about you, David? When did you first fall in love with plants?

A long time ago. I think my story starts a little earlier than maybe Brad and Carrie's and not just because I'm older, but I used to have a picture of my office door of me, like as a three-year-old with a watering can, my jumper suit on, and I'm watering plants on the deck of my house. Both my parents were avid gardeners, large vegetable garden. My dad planted trees and shrubs galore, turned everywhere he moved into a forest. That rubbed off on me and I grew up in the north coast of California, about an hour and a half north of the Bay Area. It's a really great climate for growing things. I mean, you can grow just about anything in the world there. Anything from the Mediterranean regions, you know, Mediterranean, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, but also things from like the cloud forest of Ecuador grow there. So just a huge diversity. The state has the highest diversity of native plants itself. And just what you can cultivate is pretty amazing. Sometimes people's front yards would be like botanical gardens because it's easy to grow things. A lot of people are involved in plants just in their yards. There was a lot of small farms, herbalist in just my small town. In my high school, I remember there was one family ran a bamboo nursery.

Oh my goodness.

I had another friend in high school whose parents were ethnobotanist and traveled to the Amazon every year. I went to school then at UC Santa Cruz. I studied conservation biology, botany, agro-ecology, which is like looking at agricultural systems from an ecological process perspective. So I just kept coming back to plants. Luckily enough, I landed here in Boulder County. I got a job with Boulder County Open Space originally as a carpenter.

That's working with plants?

It is, working with trees. Then that morphed into working as a plant ecologist and now into my current role for all these years. I'm just really grateful that I was able to find a job and dedicate a career to my passion for plants and my passion for the outdoors, and combining those two things. So that's been wonderful.

Well, this is a good place to do it in this very biologically diverse Boulder County, and particularly at Boulder County Parks & Open Space. So what I'd like to do now is having you tell us a little bit more about how your roles with Boulder County Parks & Open Space are helping us as a community cure our plant blindness. David, do you want to start with a couple of examples of things you've worked on in this 28 years you've been with us here?

Well, there's a lot. I think we'll share, you know, we do a lot of monitoring and mapping. We do restoration work. I think at one point, you know, you mentioned the interest in the health of our plant communities and how we do that and how we keep track of that. And I think that health of those communities really depends on elevation. It's really correlated to our elevation. Our plant communities on the plains are less healthy than our plant communities up in the foothills and perhaps the mountains too. And that's really a factor of disturbance. You know, the plains have had more disturbance, more long term disturbance. They still have a lot of disturbance. Agriculture is a complete conversion of our natural plant communities, housing development, roads. We have those disturbances in the mountains and the foothills too. You know, we've had a history of logging and mining, but that's kind of a pulse of disturbance. And we don't have the necessary non-native plant pressure up there that we do in the plains. So even those disturbances, there's been time for those landscapes to heal. And many times those native plants will come back. You know, I would posit that even, you know, disturbances can be a good thing. Natural disturbances like flood, like fire, like prairie dogs. In the absence of those invasive plants, it actually increases your diversity. Also these early sereal species that come in that you might not have seen before a fire or before the prairie dogs ate all the grasses. But with those non-native plants, and I keep referring to these non-native invasive plants because I do think they're one of the biggest threats to the health of our native plant communities. You know, we're lucky here. We do have some really good examples of, like you've been alluding to, I mean, a lot of diversity, a lot of imperiled plant species. One of the things we did a few years ago was to put out some monitoring transects in some of these imperiled grassland communities. Because the grassland communities, I think, are the ones that we probably lost the most of and continue to be the most threatened. Our shrub communities are fairly resilient. Our forest, we know, are overgrown, denser than they should be due to lack of fire historically. But we're working on that. And actually thinning those forests can improve the understory plant communities for the better. But our grasslands are still perhaps the most threatened. And so we put in some monitoring transects in some of these imperiled plant communities. You mentioned the Big Bluestem. That was one of them, the Xeric Big Bluestem. Also New Mexico Feather Grass, Needle and Thread Grass. We want to just put those out there for a baseline to see, track the health of these grasslands. Because there's been a lot of, you know, we have our anecdotal evidence, our qualitative, like, hey, it looks good. I think it looks as good as it did four years ago, or maybe it's a little worse in staff changes and your baseline shifts. So having these transects there is going to allow us to, you know, really capture some quantitative data and look at those communities and say, yeah, are they healthy? Are they trending down? Are they staying the same? Are they trending up and better manage those? What we did that first, that was probably three years ago. I mean, they were in really good shape.

These are native grasslands. Can you tell us more about what makes a native grassland here in Boulder County? I know we don't have them everywhere. You mentioned agriculture takes, you know, basically as a complete conversion. We've got a lot of agriculture here. So where are the little pockets of native plant communities that have not been disturbed, haven't been turned over for agriculture, and how big an area is that?

They're on the smaller side, typically where people couldn't plow, steeper terrain, rocky outcrops.

So kind of up against the foothills, too.

Kind of up against the foothills we're left with. You think what's been developed in the county and what hasn't, so it's kind of the foothills. And there are some pockets out east near Rock Creek Farm in Lafayette and Broomfield. There's pockets in those properties also out there along kind of the Rock Creek area, we call it. Some of that was farmed as dryland farming, dryland wheat fields. Probably 15, 20 years ago, the department made a big effort to restore those back to grasslands. We took it, they were not very marginally productive as dryland wheat or whatever they were growing. So we did a big push to put those back to grasslands. And then even amongst those, there are remnants of native grassland in those ravines and draws and stuff. But yeah, most of these grasslands are kind of in the foothills along Highway 36, both east and west, Rabbit Mountain up in Hall Ranch and Howe Valley Ranch.

Yeah, so both small remnants that have never been plowed and then some other areas where we've actually actively tried to restore a native plant community from the species that Carrie talked about earlier, that we are growing with our volunteers at the Native Seed Garden. Brad, do you want to add anything else on kind of what your job here in Boulder County entails that really helps us bring elevate plants in our culture and in our conservation?

Yeah, well in our Plant Ecology Work Group, we have three main sort of objectives. One is to conserve or protect what we have. Another is to restore areas that have been degraded over time or that are damaged or disturbed. And then the other is to engage the public to involve them. And so we're all sort of involved in all these different objectives. But something that I do maybe more frequently than the others is to help conserve what we have, to conserve these plant communities that are maybe imperiled to conserve our rare plant populations. David mentioned that a little bit. We've installed transects in some of these vegetation communities to get baseline data on how they're doing it so that we can see if we're improving or worsening conditions over time. But we also do this with some of our rare plant populations. We have transects that will go out and monitor annually. One example is our local endemic plant, meaning it grows here in Boulder County. And actually it grows in Larimer County as well. But our Bell's Twin Pod, which is in the Mustard family, Brassicaea, we have plots that we monitor every year just to get sort of baseline data to understand the demographics better. We also monitor our woodlily plant, which I mentioned earlier, just to see if those populations are stable in Boulder County. So we do a lot of monitoring of our plants, monitoring of vegetation communities. We also try to get baseline data of any property that we manage by mapping the vegetation there. And so it's hard to keep up with sometimes. And I feel like now we have to update older information. So we always have something to do, but to update our vegetation mapping, which basically that means trying to map what vegetation communities we have in all of our properties, just to understand what vegetation we have that can answer a lot of management questions later on. For example, during forestry thinning projects for wildfire mitigation, our forestry group will say, OK, here's our proposed prescription for thinning. And it will go out to our other work groups, Wildlife and Education and Outreach and Plant Ecology, to us. And they'll ask, well, what concerns do you have? And so we use our vegetation mapping to try to see if the forestry prescription is compatible with the plant communities we have there. The question being, do we have any rare plants that could be impacted? Do we have any rare or sensitive vegetation communities that could be impacted by the thinning? And actually more often than not, thinning work improves our vegetation communities because they are often overgrown with ponderosa pine or lodgepole, and our shrubs and our forbs and our grasses are kind of being choked out. More commonly than not, all of these thinning projects help our plant communities. But we only know that because we have baseline data to refer to. Another good example is in the aftermath of the Cal-Wood fire, when the park was closed for at least a year, I believe. Golden Eagles had a nest in this canyon where a trail ran. I forget the name of the trail, Wapiti Trail. So when the park opened up, we realized, well, we can't have people disturbing this nest all of a sudden. So we had to reroute the trail. Well, that was a big planning process, let alone rerouting the trail itself and all the work that physically had to happen. You know, we referred to our vegetation mapping to try to see if there were any conflicts. And sure enough, we had needle and thread grass communities that were in the way. We wanted to make sure the trail didn't go through that. We wanted to make sure the trail didn't go through soils that were very erodible. We used our baseline vegetation data to try to make sure the reroute trail went somewhere that wouldn't impact our vegetation communities. And so, long story short, we tried to take all this data and collect all this data to make sure we can make really well-informed management decisions and protect what we have, protect the plant communities and plant species that we have in Boulder County.

No, that's a really good example in how really we had to thread the needle between some very unique plant communities up there in order to provide access to open space and still preserve this wonderful plant diversity. David, you talked a little bit about restoring grasslands. I know one of your big passions is restoring wetlands. Do you want to give us a little example of a recent wetland you've restored?

Yeah, restoration is a big part of my job. We get a lot of properties. The county acquires a lot of properties that may or may not be in the best of shape from past impacts, so I think every year we're restoring a few places and a few properties. Just last year we did a wetland restoration up on, above Peaceful Valley, up near Allens Park. We acquired a piece of property that had a beautiful wet meadow and also had a fen there, and a fen is kind of an old-growth wetland, like a peat-based wetland that takes a really long time to develop, as much as like a thousand years to create 88 inches of the soil. They're pretty rare in Colorado, and this property had one, and unfortunately, one of the previous owners had ditched part of the wetland to drain it.

You mean dug a hole in the wetland?

Like kind of a herringbone pattern, if you can imagine, right through the middle of this wetland. Trying to drain it presumably for, I'm not even sure what, it's too high to do agriculture, maybe for better grazing, so their cattle wouldn't get stuck in these wet, mucky soils. I don't know. So, you know, when we acquired this property, we realized, here's a good opportunity to improve this. And we went through a little bit of a process figuring out how to do it. Access was very difficult. You can't really get stuff up there to fill these trenches. Luckily, through some survey work, we found out the material they excavated was still on site. It just kind of weathered into these low mounds. But we were able to pretty much take that material, put it back, put in some kind of temporary check dams in the trench to prevent water from piping underneath it. We installed groundwater wells, actually, before we did all this work. So we'd have a baseline again of, hey, how deep is the groundwater? Is what we're going to do? We're going to improve the situation or not? Yeah, we did all that work last fall. And then this year, we went back up there. We seeded it in the fall. This summer, we went back up and planted a few thousand wetland plants. We utilized the Boulder County Youth Corps and staff and some various staff from different work groups. And it's a really scenic place. And it's hard to get to. You either have to hike a mile and a half each way, or you got to drive up this really rough road. And so it's an adventure, you know, I think the kids enjoyed it. And it's pretty easy to plant too, right? Because it's a soft peaty soil. So it's not like you're trying to dig a hole in rocks like we do in many of our properties. And anyway, we put that back. And you know, this has just been the first year we've been able to go back and look at the wells and they are indeed the groundwater is rising and the vegetation is growing. And I think it'll be a long time to recreate what we did lose, unfortunately, but at least we're on the right trajectory to get there. And it's gratifying work. You know, I think people like it. Volunteers like it. Staff enjoys it. And I think people, once they do that work, they're kind of, you know, we talked about transforming the landscape. You're also transforming people and they feel more attached to that place because they have a stake in it and kind of become future stewards of that land as well.

And speaking of volunteers, Carrie, you work a lot with volunteers in the plant world. My guess is most of your volunteers are not plant blind.

I think that's very true. Yes, I'm incredibly fortunate to work with an educated, passionate, dedicated group of volunteers here in Boulder County. One of our goals as a plant ecology work group is to increase enthusiasm and support of native plants. And through our volunteer program, I think we're really doing that very, very well. I lead a lot of volunteer projects that support the restoration work that we do. A lot of that involves a native seed collection effort where we are going out on the landscape, looking at populations of plants we might want to use in restoration. So particular species that could be workhorse species, ones that do really well in restoration, in a wide range of soil types or elevations. Maybe we're looking for plants that are a little bit more specific, that we want to increase their populations throughout the county. Our volunteers are instrumental in those efforts. They not only come, help us collect seed. They come into our offices in the winter and help us clean the seed before we can put it into a seed mix and get it out on the landscape. They will help us pull those weeds, those non-native plants from our lands. They help us sow seeds in the landscape. They help us plant plants. Our volunteers are really a huge part of our restoration program. And there's a lot of other ways you can get involved with Parks & Open Space. You don't always have to come and give your sweat equity. You could join a nature hike and learn about grassland community. You could come and learn about go on a wildflower hike in the spring. There's a lot of nature hikes that are centered around animals as well. And just because we're talking about plants doesn't mean we don't care about the animals. Obviously, we do. And so we have a lot of great opportunities to engage the public and volunteers to build those relationships, those long-term connections with the landscape right here in our backyard.

Well, that is wonderful to know. And I think if any of our listeners are interested in getting involved, they can just search volunteers for Boulder County Parks & Open Space. They'll find all kinds of opportunities. So I think that's great. It really is a wonderful connection. Back to our original topic of plant blindness. How do we empower our listeners to see plants? Brad, do you have any examples or good tips and tricks to help people become more aware of the plants around them?

When you are out and about and hiking on the trail and just pause and observe to be curious and to ask questions, one question you might ask is, what is that plant? And I ask that all the time.

You are a plant biologist.

Yes, but there is a lot of unknowns out there. So I think one tool that people can, that anyone can use if they have a mobile device or even if they take a picture of a plant when they are out and about and come back home and go on to their computer is to try to identify it. One app that I use quite frequently is iNaturalist, sort of a citizen science where you can take photos of plants and animals and other forms of life when you are out and about, upload it, and other people help you identify that species. The critical part of it is that all the photos that you take are geo-referenced. So you also should try to make sure you either know where you took the photo or better yet just have your geo-reference on when you are taking a photo with your phone, for example. But I have learned so much through iNaturalist and continue to do so You can look at plant distributions, which I find incredibly helpful. There is a lot of value in it too for land managers. We use it frequently to look at other people's observations. If we see someone upload what we think is a rare plant, we will go and check that spot out. If we notice something kind of on the fringe of its known distribution, we will go and check it out. So I encourage people to use iNaturalist other than understanding and learning the name of the plant. You can look into its life history. You can see how it's structured, like genus is it under what family, is it under what order. It's just a good opportunity to learn more about plants and see how everything is related and connected.

In the palm of your hand, you can become more aware of all the diversity of plants. Carrie, do you have any ideas that people could tap into?

Absolutely. If you're a little more old school and you don't want to lean into the applications on your phone, you could always pick up some great plant ID books. The Colorado Native Plant Society has some really great resources on their website, books you can buy, workshops you can take. So I really encourage folks to look up the Native Plant Society online and check out their workshops and their bookstore. It's a great place to get your hands on a physical book to flip through those pages if that's something that calls to you.

I love the books where they really are color-coded. So you're out there and you're looking at that red flower and you have your little handy dandy book and you go to the red corners. Yep. And then you can start narrowing it down and have hopefully a successful plant identification, like you said, with the real book.

That's right. And another great way, I know I already mentioned volunteering, but a lot of my amazing volunteers at the Peck Native Seed Garden call working on the land dirt therapy. So getting out on the landscape, volunteering for Boulder County Parks & Open Space, volunteering for another local agency, or just working in your own backyard. Getting your hands in the dirt and really starting to feel that connection if you haven't before or deep in that connection if you already have is a wonderful way to build and foster that relationship with the plant life around you.

Well, I can tell you that by planting a few native plants in my own yard has really made me more aware of them when I see them out and when I'm hiking a trail. So if you've got the opportunity to plant a little native plant garden in your own backyard or front yard or even in a flower box, it can help you become more plant aware for sure.

Sure does.

David, how about you? We've been talking about individual plants. What about plants on a bigger scale? Can you kind of help round out the picture of the value of seeing plants?

Yeah, I think I agree with everyone here, you know, to empower people, slowing down, being curious. You don't necessarily need to travel to an exotic locale to learn about fancy beautiful plants. You can start in your own backyard, like you said, a small pollinator garden has a lot of value, and 100 small pollinator gardens in the neighborhood has even more value. I think it's important to remind people that, you know, it doesn't need to be glamorous and beautiful to provide all these ecosystem services we've talked about. People should be aware that because something to them seems really common doesn't mean it's not unique. An example I use in Boulder County is Mountain Mahogany, some of our shrublands. And if you're up in the Lions area or Larimer County has quite a lot of it, but if you're on a Rabbit Mountain and Hall Ranch and Picture Rock, you're like Mountain Mahogany, it's everywhere, you know, it's common, whatever. But it's actually one of our imperiled plant communities. But if you zoom out on that landscape perspective, you notice that it's really just this little band through Larimer County and the northern part of Boulder County. It doesn't even really exist south of Left Hand Canyon. OSMP doesn't really have Mountain Mahogany populations. Jefferson County doesn't. It might be a little bit in Clear Creek Canyon, and then it disappears entirely on the rest of the front range. And again, I think once people realize they have something special, something unique, something rare, they're kind of more intrigued by it. They want to maybe learn more about it. They maybe are more inclined to protect it, feel some pride in those plants and those communities. You know, that just kind of is a feedback, positive feedback cycle for them to learn and care about plants.

So you can use your iPhone, you can get your books, you can go volunteer and you can just be out there and walk around and be observant and then go back and check it out when you're back at home. How rare is this community? What was that plant I saw? I think those are great examples. For our last round robin, where is a good place for anyone that wants to go out on Boulder County and see some really good plant diversity? Where would you recommend?

There's so many places. Almost any of our major parks can provide some beautiful plant life of viewing. One place that comes to mind in particular could be Caribou Ranch. Up in the late spring when the flowers are blooming is a beautiful place to not only learn some plants, maybe get away from the heat a little bit, get up high and really slow down. That's a theme I think in our podcast here is just allow yourself the time to slow down and just be.

So Caribou Ranch, you get the trees, you get the aspen, you get the variety of plants. So Caribou Ranch is a great suggestion. Brad, where would you direct people?

The plains are a little underappreciated, especially during summer because it gets so hot and you want that tree cover and such a desire to go up into the mountains. There's really amazing plains species out there that are worth seeing. So I would encourage people to stay low and pay close attention, hike a little slower and try to deal with the intense sun in the summer or early spring to try to look at some of our plains species.

From like the Coalton Trailhead.

Coalton Trailhead would be a great example of that, yeah.

David, you've had some time to think about it now. I know you don't want to give away your most favorite spot.

I was thinking of one spot and I'm being selfish and like, maybe I don't want to share that. One area that's coming to mind, and it's a small little part of a much larger property, is even the Lichen Loop at Heil Valley Ranch. And we had the Overland Fire, which seemed fairly destructive. We lost a lot of trees, almost all the trees in that area. But it really, again, opened up the understory. And there's quite a wonderful show of wildflowers in that little loop now. I mean, perhaps there always was, but I think it's even better than it was in the past. You know, if you go there in May and early June, kind of that early, late spring, early summer, it's pretty fabulous. And I think many people also don't know that, like, parts of Heil and Rabbit Mountain are our most botanically diverse properties, more so than some of these subalpine high mountain properties even. So yeah, that's been quite a beautiful little trek there. It's really accessible to a lot of people.

Yeah, the Lichen Loop at Heil Valley Ranch, it's only 1.3 miles and there's beautiful rock outcroppings. And now that the trees are gone, you get some beautiful vistas. And to me, it's a perfect example of watching what disturbance does and how fire is part of our ecosystem and then how the ecosystem can respond after fire like that. So it's a good thing. It's a good thing to have those disturbances and have beautiful fields of wildfire afterwards. Well, I want to thank the three of you for sharing your experiences. I think we all now have a better understanding of what plant blindness is. And I would say the three of you do not fall prey to that illness at all. You've been very plant aware. We've learned that plants are an integral part of our ecosystem, the ecosystem that supports life on earth and life here in Boulder County. We've learned that overlooking plants while trying to protect our environment can have devastating consequences. We've also heard your personal stories of the amazing plant diversity we have here on Open Space. We heard some great stories of how we are making strides to get plants on equal footing with wildlife when we create plants to protect our open space lands. And our knowledgeable staff have shared some new and fun resources we can use, as easy as an app on your phone to help us overcome our own plant blindness. I want to thank you for spending this time here today helping educate our audience about plant blindness. It was an eye-opening discussion.

Well, thank you for listening today to our podcast on plant blindness. I also want to thank Longmont Public Media for providing this beautiful space for us to record this podcast. And I encourage you to please follow us on your favorite social media platform like Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. And be sure to follow our podcast. This is just one of many that we have out there. There are many more coming. So please follow our Voices of Open Space Podcast on your favorite streaming service.