Joey Santore came across the idea for his book “Concrete Botany: The Ecology of Plants in the Age of Human Disturbance” when he noticed plants growing out of sidewalk cracks in big cities.
“They always somehow seemed more attractive to me in their form and their placement than most of the stuff that I saw planted in front of the bank or the drugstore,” he said. “I was really interested in the ruderal plants, the plants that kind of grow amidst the rubble on the margins of society.”
Santore has been studying botany for over a decade and runs a blog and YouTube channel called Crime Pays but Botany Doesn’t. His site includes pages titled “Kill Your lawn” and “How to take a Herbarium specimen.”
He said most people don’t pay attention to plants, and he wanted to change that.
“When you grow up in a society that teaches you that every plant needs to be nicely manicured, hedged, evenly spaced and in a line — and most of them don’t even occur in nature at all, they’re literally cultivars that were bred in greenhouses for showy leaves or more conspicuous flowers — you grow up with that being the standard,” he said. “You kind of end up viewing nature and the living world as ugly and messy and full of ticks.”
Santore said his goal is to help people make the same transformation in thinking that he himself made when he started studying plant life.
“Before I got into botany, all I knew was the human world and people can be great, but people can also be really depressing. And the human role can be depressing, right?,” he said. “And so when I discovered this whole other living world outside of it, the world of what most people would call ‘nature’… it was literally an escape from that, but it was also an answer to it.”
Part of that escape, Santore said, was coming to the understanding that nature has been around a lot longer than people have.
“Our human world is very recent. It’s a very recent thing in terms of the age of the Earth,” he said. “All this other stuff has been here a lot longer. And so it became something that I just became obsessed with and it was fascinating.”
Santore said he hopes this book makes people a little less “plant blind” and more in tune with what’s around them.
“I would hope that it offers them some of the same philosophical reprieve that it offered me when I learned about all this stuff initially,” he said. “I hope that it elucidates their own standing in the world and how we came to be here. And most importantly, I hope it encourages them to have a little bit of respect and curiosity about the context of the things that live and grow around them.”
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