I feel like part of this is a lack of gardening. I used to love gardening and watching plants grow as a child in my grandmother's garden. Carrots, beets, berries, onions, etc. All pretty easy, as long as you aren't worried about having too many! Even though I don't have a lot of knowledge about plants, I do certainly have more of an appreciation.
I was just looking at a house yesterday and spied a garden growing in the side yard and remarked I think those are onions! Of course the agent had no idea apparently what an onion plant looks like, which kind of surprised me. But then after a bit, it also didn't surprise me!
Of course I have to mention the amazing and great youtube channel "Crime pays but botany doesn't", here's a neat recent video:
For a nice way to start discovering plants around you I recommend the excellent iNaturalist app/site: See a plant, snap a photo and the app will suggest what it thinks it is. Other users can help with identification if the app fails.
Besides beeing a kind of nerdy pokemon go (how many organisms can you collect?) it's also crowd-sourced science.
What's fun of I naturalist is that with someone confirming your ID (or two others agreeing) your observation is included in a variety of databases used by researchers. It's fun to help out in a low key way.
In my country (NL) stonyfication of garden is a real problem. Apart from looking like shit, the loss of seasonal flowering plants and water absorption in the soil are becoming major problems.
There's peer pressure too: a neighbour is angry because leaves get stuck on our bushes and blow onto her gravel. People rave about being able to vacuum their garden. It's insane.
I was just looking at a house yesterday and spied a garden growing in the side yard and remarked I think those are onions! Of course the agent had no idea apparently what an onion plant looks like, which kind of surprised me. But then after a bit, it also didn't surprise me!
Of course I have to mention the amazing and great youtube channel "Crime pays but botany doesn't", here's a neat recent video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThU0SUcf6Ws