by Patrick McShea
Plants travel across time and territory as seeds. The movement of seeds, each one a tiny embryo packaged with stored food in a protective coating, can generally be attributed to one of five forces – gravity, wind, flowing water, spring-like ejection from the parent plant, or transport by animals, whether deliberately or accidentally.
In Uprooted: Plants Out of Place, the new exhibition examining invasive plants from multiple perspectives, seed dispersal by humans, a subset of the fifth force, receives attention for its landscape altering impact. The exhibition occupies two sites within the museum, the Hall of Botany, and the third-floor balcony above Kamin Hall of Dinosaurs. In between, floor-mounted exhibition emblems serve as wayfinding guides between the sites. Visitors who follow these raindrop-shaped directional aids should consider the short walk and elevator ride or stair climb to represent the frequently unnoticed journeys by a whole category of organisms we mistakenly consider to be rooted and immobile.
Just inside the entry to the Hall of Botany, an exhibition panel for Uprooted provides a definition of “native” that is crucial to understanding issues related to invasive plants. Plants don’t buy houses, but they do have ‘home’ ranges where they have grown for a long period of time. We call plants found in their home ranges native. Visual examples can greatly aid in the comprehension of a new term, and here the surrounding life-sized dioramas depicting plants native to Pennsylvania woodlands, Lake Erie beach margins, Florida swamp land, the Sonoran Desert, and an alpine meadow on Mount Ranier, provide tremendous, and frequently colorful, reinforcement.
On the same panel, below the bold-faced clarification, Passengers, not drivers, visitors are presented with another key definition: Introduced plants that cause harm to the environment or humans around them are called invasive species. Four such invasive species and their attendant problems are profiled in nearby free-standing displays that feature preserved plant material in the form of herbarium sheets, maps documenting invasive plant establishment and rapid expansion, examples of a single plant’s seed production, and explanations of why each was brought, as seed, cuttings, root stock, or whole plant, to our region of the world. Three of the species were deliberately introduced here because of perceived potential benefits. Callery pear (Pyrus calleryana) was introduced because of its beautiful flowers. Multiflora rose (Rosa multiflora) was a favored root stock for grafting and hedgerow creation. Garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) was valued as a culinary and medicinal herb. Stiltgrass (Microstegium vimnea), the fourth profiled plant, was introduced accidentally during an early 20th Century period when large quantities of the whole plant, including seedheads, served as disposable protective packaging for porcelain shipped from Asia.
In sharing the stiltgrass story in the Hall of Botany, Uprooted makes powerful use of the unique space. On the left edge of the diorama that has depicted early summer beneath the canopy of a mature hemlock/northern hardwood forest for over 50 years, visitors will find a suggestion for a scene altering exercise. Imagine stiltgrass growing in this forest for several years – what would it look like? Would it be very different from what you see now? Because the information below this thought prompt notes the tendency of stiltgrass to choke out wildflowers and tree seedlings by forming dense mats, an initial mental alteration of the diorama scene might simply involve a drastic change in the look of the forest floor. However, for visitors who first study details in the meticulously recreated landscape and notice such details as the ovenbird standing just in front of its distinctive domed nest (lower right front corner), the sense of loss will be compounded.
A more hopeful and action-oriented approach awaits visitors on the third-floor balcony section of Uprooted. Here a video loop briefly introduces people from three local organizations working to mitigate the negative impacts of invasive plants, an interactive panel guides visitors to make informed purchases from plant nurseries, and an array of plant portraits by Japanese photographer Koichi Watanabe summarizes his study of conflicting cultural perspectives surrounding the plant known to science as Reynoutria japonica and locally termed Japanese knotweed. In the text panel explaining his approach, Watanabe provides a quote that is a fitting summary for this innovative exhibition: When people move, plants move with them.
Patrick McShea is Educator Emeritus at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.
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