I was teaching my nursery management students about marketing recently and how important it is to communicate the value and wonder of plants. I used to be of the mindset that plants are amazing and should be able to sell themselves. But, I read a fascinating article a few years ago that changed my mind that I shared with the class.
Titled "Pearls Before Breakfast" and authored by Gene Weingarten and a handful of Washington Post writers, it was about a mini-experiment that consisted of three parts.
Joshua Bell, one of the top violin performers of our time who gets paid over $1000 per hour.
A Stradivari violin that cost over $3 million. In fact, the article even kidded that Joshua took a cab a couple of blocks just because he was scared something would happen to it.
A large audience, over a thousand people in DC rush hour metro.
Their thesis, “in a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?” They would evaluate it by observing how many people would stop and how much would he make during this 45 minute performance. Such a performance by a famous musician with a priceless violin in front of such a large audience would likely be worth thousands and thousands of dollars.
Feel free to ponder, and scroll down for the answer.
$32.17. Thirty-two dollars and seventeen cents. In fact, $20 came from a lady who actually recognized him. In that time period he had 27 people stop and watch.
So, here you have one of the world’s most famous musicians playing a solo concert with a $3.5 million dollar violin to 1097 people. How was this lost on all those people? Joshua even commented, “I’m surprised at the number of people who don’t pay attention at all, as if I’m invisible. Because, you know what? I’m makin’ a lot of noise!”
Now, as a scientist I realize this case is an n = 1 situation. Perhaps they should have repeated it multiple days. But, I still think we can learn from this scenario.
Why didn’t people stop to appreciate this art?
Maybe people were in a rush to get to work and don’t have time.
Maybe people ignored the performer, conditioned from hearing other performers over the years.
Maybe the context was wrong for the place and the music.
Maybe people lacked the knowledge of how valuable this performance was.
Maybe people didn’t know the whole story.
So, what does this all have to do with plants? There’s this phenomenon called plant blindness where people are not immediately aware of plants in their environment. They pass them by without noticing, even though plants maybe benefiting them even though the people don’t realize it. Why don’t people see plants?
Maybe people are in a rush and don’t have time.
Maybe people are conditioned from seeing plants over the years.
Maybe the context is wrong for the place and the plants.
Maybe people lack the knowledge of how valuable these plants are.
Maybe people don’t know the whole story.
Now, perhaps there are evolutionary benefits to that blindness such as we learn to filter out things are are not friend or foe or food. But, we horticulturists have realized that plant blindness may explain why so many people don’t appreciate our work or the value of plants.
The take away from this article for me is that we can’t just stick plants out there and expect people to stop and appreciate them. It takes more.
While the article states there were two groups of people, those who stopped and those who didn’t, I’d argue that there is a third—a group of people who if they knew what was going on they would have paused at the marvel of it all.
We don’t need to try to get everyone to stop and appreciate plants. Just a few more. Perhaps through us being plant evangelists, by sharing how wonderful these photosynthetic creatures are in terms people can understand, and by sharing the incredible story of plants, we can remove the blinders and help people see.