Connecting people, plants and place: A native plant society's journey towards a community of practice

Abstract

1. Native plants are often promoted for gardening, biodiversity conservation and ecological restoration. Native plant gardening can contribute to environmental sustainability by conserving water and creating biologically diverse habitat.Despite the many virtues of native plants, there are challenges to building relationships between people and plants, including limited plant availability and low level of general plant appreciation and literacy. Activities that foster peopleplant connections can help to alleviate Plant Awareness Disparity, foster plant conservation and produce more native plants.2. We describe how our environmental non-profit organization, the Kootenay Native Plant Society, has worked to encourage people-plant connections in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia, Canada, over a 10-year period. We borrowed from different disciplines, practices and theories to inform our workfrom organic gardening and ecological restoration to sustainable development.Our programmes developed from outreach and educational activities to more place-based and interactive initiatives. Initial activities, including wildflower walks and school programmes, offered plant information but more meaningful plant engagement was needed. We provided deeper knowledge through a flagship species approach showcasing a native plant, camas Camassia quamash, itxwa, resulting in greater appreciation for camas, although this strategy rarely translated to broader plant conservation by residents. We developed more specialized programmes that trained participants in native plant propagation and gardening, where they gained competence and contributed to a social group linked by community-based conservation efforts and a passion for native plants.3. We learned our journey to connect more people with native species and get plants into gardens was a pathway towards a community of practice. Building lasting people-plant connections is not straightforward; it is an adaptive integrative process requiring delivery of dynamic and complementary activities developed over time from cumulative insights and organizational reflection. What we thought was simply an unavailability of native plants paired with people's lack of native plant appreciation was more complex, requiring a shift in social | 1415

Absence of botanical European Palaeolithic cave art: What can it tell us about plant awareness disparity?

“…By making this historical link, an insight into human attitudes towards plants can be speculated upon thus aiding research and practice into the process of educating people on plants. Although the experience of cave dweller compared with the modern human is vastly different, the knowledge of our ancestors can still be utilised to improve and protect plant–people connections (Beckwith et al, 2022). It may be that we can only tentatively make the inference that PAD is ancestrally derived, however it is interesting to note the lack of plants in cave art.…”

Application of MaxEnt Modeling and HRM Analysis to Support the Conservation and Domestication of Gevuina avellana Mol. in Central Chile

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