Why you Should Keep a Wild Plant Index
Building a Relationship with the Land & Practicing Reciprocity
For several years, I lived in Spokane, Washington with my partner. We lived just uphill from downtown in a hilly neighborhood that was an eclectic mix of very old homes and apartment buildings with newer buildings interspersed throughout. Walking from my Spokane apartment to the grocery store up the hill, I passed by countless plants unfamiliar to me. I grew up in a small town at the foothills of the Ozark mountains. I knew oaks, redbuds, and eastern red cedars but not ponderosa pines, arrowleaf balsamroots, nor ash trees. My partner Damien and I walked this path from our apartment at the base of the south hill up to Rosauer’s grocery multiple times each week. Ours was a neighborhood filled with historic homes and many of the homeowners in the area obviously put a lot of care into the design and maintenance of the plants in their tiny landscapes. One particular small and unassuming home had a yard in which every square inch seemed to be put to use: yarrow, coneflower, and mint along the sidewalk, grape vines and hops stretching across the fence, a row of large elderberry trees with branches hanging over the sidewalk, along with a couple of fruit trees, a bee box, and more. I was captivated by this house and its tiny ecosystem.
Each time I walked by, I would slow down and sometimes stop for a moment, studying what was growing there, eventually continuing home to research the plants I’d seen. This period of time was early 2020, so I had plenty of time for walks and research. I learned about the ecological and medicinal benefits of plants like yarrow and purple coneflower. I became more aware of and intent on observing wild plants on longer walks by the Spokane river and on hikes outside of the city. Doing this, I learned many plants of the western US and gained an increasingly strong impulse to gather as much plant knowledge as I could. I started thinking about how little regard I had given plants in the past and I really wanted to change that.
I began the habit of carrying a small notebook and drawing implement with me whenever I went on walks. I took loads of photos on my phone of any plant I found interesting. With this I began my plant index. This is a habit I still have, five years later. Some mornings I go sit in the woods and look at all of the new spring growth, noting unfamiliar flora. I take photos, make quick sketches, or write down plants I see. I’ve learned about so many wild plants doing this since moving back to the Ozarks. Often overlooked plants like wild bergamot and violet woodsorrel grow prolifically in the understory of the woods behind my home. Whereas I would have passed them by without a thought before, I now see their striking beauty and walk a bit more gently around them.
Keeping a journal or index of plants, wild and domestic, is a way to reconnect with the land where you live. It’s easy to overlook wild plants and to take them for granted, but it’s infinitely more fun and more rewarding to notice them. Building up a repository of plant knowledge is an important part of what we do on the farm, working alongside a native ecosystem to grow food and support wildlife. Plant knowledge connects us to wild plants as food and medicine; knowledge people only a few generations ago wouldn’t have survived without. Learning the wild plants and appreciating their place in the ecosystem is crucial to regenerating a healthy landscape. It also makes us much less likely to make quick decisions like removing a shrub we aren’t familiar with in favor of a specific flowering shrub, for example.
Wild Plant Knowledge and Agroecology
Knowledge and appreciation of wild plants is one of many building blocks for practicing sustainable agriculture in a world that often seeks to remove what’s there and keep only what’s most desirable. This removal of undesirable plants and animals often happens in conventional agriculture— tilling the ground each season and starting all over with adding chemical fertilizers, planting monocrops that will be inevitably vulnerable to disease and pests, and treatment of that monocrop with pesticides and fungicides, in an ever-repeating cycle. Studying, observing, and incorporating wild plants into agriculture (agroecology) gets us a little bit closer to a sustainable system of growing food and living than conventional agriculture practices could.
What is a Wild Plant Index?
A wild (and/or domestic) plant index is simply a collection of images of, and words about, wild plants that you build and put together as you discover them. It is a way to compile visual and written information about wild plants so that you can learn more about them and refer back to it later. I say wild and/or domestic because while my wild plant index is mostly wild plants, it does include some cultivated plants I want to be able to refer back to. Plenty of people keep gardening journals each year to document which cultivated plants do well, which ones don’t, methods they’ve used to deal with pest pressure or pathogenic plant diseases, etc. Your plant index can be whatever you want it to be.
Not to sound like a luddite, but I strongly encourage you to make your plant index have a mostly tactile nature rather than being strictly digital. You could keep notes in the notes app on your phone, sure, but the experience of writing and drawing by hand helps the knowledge seep into our brains (it’s science). If you aren’t into drawing plants in your index, you can always print and paste images later. On each nature walk you take, pretend you’re a botanist taking notes from the field. Record as much visual information as you can so that you can look back on it later. Spend time studying the plant visually, making all the notes you can think of. Keeping a plant index is an opportunity to slow down, observe, and connect to nature.
What to Put in your Wild Plant Index
Visual Information like drawings, photos, sketches, collage of actual plant matter (responsibly sourced, aka don’t take too much), etc.
Written Information: the plant’s name, where you saw it, notes about its physical composition, colors, growing conditions, and anything else that comes to mind.
Why you Should Keep a Wild Plant Index
Keeping a wild plant index is a completely free and extremely gratifying hobby. Not only is it gratifying, it helps build community. Invite friends on a walk or hike where you take time to notice unfamiliar plants. You could organize a plant walk in a public area or on your or a friend’s land, followed by a potluck at the end or a meal that incorporates foraged foods. There is actually a group near me that does this and I plan on attending one of their plant walks this spring or summer.
Building plant knowledge is a way to establish and strengthen our connection to the land. The more familiar you become with wild plants, the more inclined you may feel to protect them and their habitats. This can evolve into a practice of ecological care and gratitude. Our world needs as much ecological care as it can get. Documenting wild plants invites you to slow down and really see the landscape around you. This act of attention fosters a sense of presence and curiosity. Observation of wild plants helps you notice which insects visit certain flowers, what grows where, and how plants respond to drought or rain, deepening your understanding of ecosystems.
As you track which plants bloom, seed, or die back through the year, you begin to attune to seasonal rhythms, fostering a sense of place and time that modern life often erodes. Over time I have become increasingly aware of subtle seasonal shifts where I live. Early spring is when purple nettle, chickweed, and virginia springbeauties emerge. This is also the time when spring onions and field garlic can be foraged. Soon after, strawberries will be ready for harvesting. Early summer arrives with the dying back of spring ephemerals as yarrow flowers and blackberry groves bloom and frogs sing nightly in the pond. Awareness of subtle seasonal changes provide a sense of synchronicity that often feels hard to come by.
Knowledge of wild plants (specifically edible and medicinal ones) builds connection to those who came before us. Not too long ago, people relied on medicinal and edible plant knowledge for survival. Though access to modern medicine is very important and we are incredibly fortunate to have it, knowing how to use plants as preventative medicine, and in some cases acute treatment of illnesses, is massively empowering. For example, yarrow and/or broadleaf plantain can be used as a poultice for a cut, scrape, or burn of the skin. Mullein leaves steeped as tea can help soothe respiratory distress. Especially for those of us from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, this knowledge can mean suffering through an illness versus having access to plant medicine to help us through it.
A wild plant index can be as sporadic or as organized as you want it to be. Mine consists of hundreds of photos that I collect, often all at once on a walk, waiting to be transferred into a notebook or journal with the others. I have some pages of detailed sketches that exist throughout a few different sketchbooks and some on loose pages torn out of lined notebooks. My method is a bit sporadic, but I am currently working on synthesizing the pages into a cohesive book; my own compendium of wild plants (I’m a book artist for goodness sake, so why not?).
From my daily walks around near-downtown Spokane, WA to the woods of this Ozark hillside where I currently live, my wild plant index continues to spark curiosity. I continue to build up my reserve of plant knowledge, a gift to myself as well as one I share with others. Just the other day, I was flattered when a friend at work said to me “Oh! I bet you’ll know what this is growing along my fence,” while holding up her phone to show me a photo of a wild plant. I was happy to be able to tell her it was a cleaver, also known as the sillier names “sticky willy” and “goosegrass” (or galium aparine— the scientific name I definitely couldn’t conjure in the moment), a spring herb that people have used medicinally to promote kidney health among other things. I only knew this because cleavers grow prolifically around the farm in early spring, and so a few years ago I got curious about them and noted some basic information about them. Small exchanges of plant wisdom like this help grow collective community knowledge while building friendships as well.
Keeping a plant index is more than just a method of cataloging plants. It is a meaningful practice that deepens our connection to the land, nurtures personal and collective resilience, and strengthens community bonds. By carefully observing, recording, and reflecting on the plants around us, we cultivate a deeper appreciation for the ecosystems we rely on. This mindful engagement not only gives us knowledge and adaptability in the face of hard times and environmental change, it also encourages shared learning and collaboration. Ultimately, the practice of maintaining a plant index becomes a quiet, powerful act of stewardship, reminding us that our relationship with nature and with each other is rooted in attention, care, and reciprocity.
Thank you for being here. I deeply appreciate the opportunity to engage with you all here, so please leave a comment, like, and/or share this post if it was impactful to you in some way or if you have thoughts to share or questions to ask.
Happy spring— get out and find some plants.
With radical hope for the future,
Allyson
I'm for sure vibing with this post lately! Taking a moment to really see a plant as you walk by, to take a picture, write it down, learn its name, has opened my eyes to the world around me. Naming plants acknowledges their being-hood. I'm not good at writing down physical notes though, so my documenting gets lost in the conglomeration of digital information I save.
I've recognized something similar with land as a whole too, and only recently realized this is why people like to name their homesteads. When I talk about the land I live on I always feel at a loss for the right words. I don't like to say "my land" or "our place" because it conveys ownership instead of partnership. Giving place a name allows us to recognize it as a living dynamic ecosystem. The english language relegates anything non-human to the objectifying world of "it". Names are how we can get around that limitation, and have the power to change our entire perspective, allowing for personal relationship with Earth.