Cure Yourself of Tree Blindness https://t.co/nF3DDUINroGreat article about our Natural world stressing the value of knowledge.— George Sherman (@geosherman) October 5, 2017

There was a time when knowing your trees was a matter of life and death, because you needed to know which ones were strong enough to support a house and which ones would feed you through the winter. Now most of us walk around, to adapt a term devised by some botanists, tree blind.
But here’s the good news: Tree blindness can be cured. A few years ago, I knew two types of native trees, oak and maple. I considered all conifers to be pines. Then in 2012, I took an ecology course in Wisconsin in which we learned to identify 14 tree species — which, in the chilly upper Midwest, actually gets you pretty far. Suddenly the largest, most conspicuous living beings in my environment were no longer strangers. The trees lining my street in Madison with the rough, saucer-size leaves were basswoods. The giant in my backyard with the diamond bark and opposing rows of leaflets neatly lined up like soldiers was an ash.
- Gabriel Popkin
My take:
I cured myself of Plant and Flower blindness by gradually learning the names of the flora that I suddenly started seeing everywhere. Old hikes were new again. Never realized how some plants bloomed only in Summer or Fall or how the blooms of Spring could be further divided into early, middle or late Spring. An awakening for me and it does take my mind off the awful presdent we have.