Botany Eyes with Botanist Ryan Godfrey

Hi, welcome to The Garden Shift. In this episode, I'm joined by botanist Ryan Godfrey. He will share stories and insights into the world of plant relationships.

Get ready to reframe plants with botany eyes after this episode. And if you get to the end, there's a fantastic wild wild bee story. Enjoy!

Tina: Hi, Ryan. I'm so happy that you're joining me on The Garden Shift today.

Ryan: Hey, Tina. Thanks for having me on.

Tina: This is fun. And I just learned that you actually did a podcast in 2019, so I'm like feeling a little nervous now talking to you.

Ryan: Oh, it was, you know, a little side project, a little fun thing I did for a minute, but you're going to be great. I believe in you.

Tina: So, Ryan, I haven't caught up with you in a little while. Just let us know a little bit about what you're doing with the WWF and your conservation focus.

Ryan: Yeah, so I've been working with the World Wildlife Fund Canada for six years now, believe it or not. I have, I would love to say that there's a focus. It's a bit of a split focus. I work on a lot of different projects, but the two main ones are our community action platform, ReGrow, which is a place where we hope that gardeners of all different stages can learn how to integrate ecology, ecological concepts and habitat gardening into their lives through actions and can share that with other people on the platform. So lots to learn there. It's a pretty cool space.

And then the other project that I have going on is a granting program called Seed Orchards, where I work with a lot of different types of groups, including native plant nurseries and conservation organizations and First Nations to amplify the availability of locally, ethically and source identified native plant seeds for restoration work. Because we've found through our work at the World Wildlife Fund that as much as we want to do ecological restoration, there's a huge bottleneck in actually finding the seeds. So I'm working with people to address that need.

Tina: That's amazing. It's interesting because I was just thinking about native plants and restoration work and big scale projects. I went to the opening weekend of the Portland's, what used to be Ashbridges Bay, right? Down there. Have you heard about that?

Ryan: Yes, yes. I actually go out there. I bike there just about every week. I go out to Tommy Thompson Park and have a little time with one of my buddies. It's our little nature getaway in the city.

Tina: Right. Yeah. And I think the thing about Tommy Thompson is in the spit, right?

Ryan: Yes.

Tina: Yeah. So I love the way that it is so natural and how you can't bring your dog in there. And they're focusing on the birds that are using it and the animals. But the Portland's, I just found, was really human centered, which I think helped so many of us with this awareness of plants, right? Because you helped me a lot with terminology, but I just find that when I talk to people about native plants, they look at me like, what do you mean by that? So I think now we just have to get people to be aware that there are plants that are ecologically significant. Do you use that term? How do you find that language with normal folk?

Ryan: It's complex. It's definitely complex. I've actually written a blog about it with some colleagues because I find, yeah, you're completely right.

The terminology gets really confusing and language is always evolving and updating too. And the way that a word may have come into use may not be the way that it continues to get used. For example, the term invasive, which has a really specific definition in ecological science, but the way that people use it practically in gardening and horticulture is a bit messier, right? So so ecologically relevant, I think is a great term.

You know, I always like to bring it down to relationships. So, you know, native plants, I always just say they have those deep ecological and evolutionary relationships with each other and with other organisms and the soil and the whole environment. And those relationships have developed over the course of thousands and tens of thousands of years.

And for that reason, they're irreplaceable or not easily replaceable. It would take a really, really long time to replace those relationships. But yeah, you know, just try to meet people where they are with terminology.

I ask a lot of questions. I ask, oh, what do you mean by that exactly? Or what makes you think that this is a weed, for example? Or which weed are you talking about exactly? You know, zeroing in on where it is that people are coming from with their terminology, because I don't expect everyone to be a botanist and to have studied all of that lingo in an intensive kind of way.

Tina: Right. But you do say, though, on your website that you want to teach people to have botany eyes. So tell me about that.

Ryan: That I think is really achievable beyond like learning all of the Latin names of every native and non-native plant.

Botany eyes, to me, is just literally noticing, like seeing that there's diversity out there. And I think, and I was this way too, that I think most people see just a mass of green, just a wall of green, and they're just walking past it. They're not noticing the differences, the different leaves, the different branches, the different textures and colors.

If there isn't a bright pop of yellow or pink or white to sort of draw their eyes to, it's just a mass of greenness. And that is a type of blindness, I think. It's been called plant blindness or nature blindness.

And it's an affliction that is actually treatable, I think. I think everyone could do it at any age and at any stage of life. And it's not that difficult to dispel either.

It's just a matter of shifting your intention and spending a little bit of time with the plants and animals that are all around you all of the time. But, you know, our brains are really good at editing out the things that we think are not relevant to our lives. But guess what? Plants are extremely relevant to our lives.

It's really, really helpful, actually, and useful to know what the different plants are. So the first, the very first thing is just to teach your brain, hey, I actually want to pay attention to this. I want to spend some time noticing the differences.

And all of a sudden, you know, it happened to me during my undergraduate degree at the University of British Columbia. I was introduced to the plants of the Pacific temperate rainforest by one of my mentors, Shona Ellis, who taught me the beginnings of everything that I know about plants. And she just really took it very slowly. Like, let's learn this tree. The very first one I remember was a Douglas fir. And she told me stories about the tree.

She told me how to notice the they look like mouse tails that are sticking out of the bracts of the cones of the Douglas fir. And she told me this story about how indigenous peoples in the coast, they say that because it's a fire ecosystem, so fires really maintain and move the ecological cycle in those coastal temperate rainforest ecosystems. And so they're important and they show up in stories.

And the story is that when fires went through the forest in times long ago, the mice ran up the Douglas fir tree and jumped into the cones to find shelter. But they were a little bit too big. So their back feet and their tails stuck out the back. And you can still see that to this day. And that visual stuck with me. And it's always stuck with me. And I share it with everyone I know. And I will never forget what makes a Douglas fir unique from other types of conifers because I have that story now. And it turns out you can do that with pretty much every plant. And our brains are sponges for this type of information. We can all do it. I really believe that.

Tina: That's fantastic. So I did read an article about nature blindness and the under-appreciation of plants. And I read all about how our brain is wired to appreciate wild animals, but maybe not wild plants. It made a comment. Maybe you heard this. I didn't check the source that maybe we should be referring to plants as wildlife.

Ryan: Yes, I've actually made this argument at the World Wildlife Fund. And you know, they are. They are wildlife.

And I think it changes your mindset when you start thinking of them in those terms, as living, breathing, having active creatures. And I try to use that language as often as I can to shift the focus away from this sort of passive, stationary, kind of boring life form, because plants are doing all sorts of things all the time, not to mention breathing life into all of the animals and providing us with all food and shade and shelter and building materials and medicines and everything else that they do. They're also, they are active, but they act in a slightly different kind of way.

And you have to be a little bit patient and a little bit observant to notice those behaviors. But I love that framing of thinking of them as creatures, as wildlife, and even as relatives, too. But you know, genetic relatives, we do share a common ancestor with trees, believe it or not, and all plants.

But we also share ecological relationships, right? So we're relatives in both senses.

Tina: Yeah. And I think another thing that you that you taught me over the years since I've known you is the observing part and being being super close to your plants.

And that means knowing them from seed, right? And then watching. So you've done these great videos on your balcony, because you, I think you're known in Toronto as the container gardener, like it or not, amongst people like us. But yeah, so just give us a little, you know, tale about your container garden. I mean, I think it's just great.

Ryan: Yeah. I mean, necessity is the mother of invention is really the short version of the story.

I live in the condo on the sixth floor, downtown Toronto, a very dense neighborhood, a dense habitat. And when I moved in here, I had this small balcony, about three meters by two meters in dimensions. And being a botanist and being interested in plants and wanting to have a space of my own to experiment with plants.

This is what I've got. So guess what? It's gonna be a container garden. That's what I'm gonna have to try.

And I started really with actually very little knowledge or experience. A lot of people think like, you must have studied this. Like, no, actually, I studied, I studied plants in their natural context and their ecological relationships.

I really never studied horticulture and growing plants. I did do some experiments where I grew plants in greenhouses, but that's even a different kind of situation. So I was basically starting from close to scratch.

And I just had this motivation of like, let's try it, let's see what we can do. And I'm going to start by trying some of my favorite plants, which are, well, I tried starting with the understory spring ephemerals that are so, so beautiful in our region, the Carolinian zone. So, you know, plants like sharp-lobed hepatica, spring beauties, wild ginger, Virginia waterleaf, Solomon's seals.

I love all of these plants because they bring me such joy in the early, early spring when they bloom before the trees have even leafed out. They pretty much, they do their whole reproductive cycle before the canopy has closed over. And I tried growing these in containers and I failed miserably, Tina.

It did not work. Absolutely did not work. And I couldn't really figure it out at first.

I tried to, oh, maybe it's something about the soil because in forests, maybe the soil is more complex, more organic, or maybe more mineral, or maybe there's microbes in the soil and fungi. And there's maybe a symbiotic relationship with trees that I'm not expressing. What I ended up learning is, you know, the plants taught me, dummy, you don't live in a forest.

If you don't live in the forest floor, that's not your ecosystem. You know, the one plant that did survive from that first early round was my first teacher. And that was wild columbine, Aquilegia canadensis, which has come to be, I think, probably, if I had to pick a single native plant to say is my number one. It's going to be wild columbine. And you know, that plant does grow in forest under stories, but it's also a cliff dweller. And so that's what I learned from wild columbine.

And then later, other plants that survived and thrived on my balcony is, they told me, hey, we're all cliff plants, because you live on a cliff, because the side of a building is hanging off, it's getting part daylight, the water really just sloughs off, guess what, it's a cliff, you have a cliff, you should grow cliff plants. It took a while.

Tina: You also masked them in habitat, I noticed, like more specifically, I was in awe of your cactus.

Ryan: Yes, I have Opuntia humifusa. Yeah, so I've tried, with different containers, I use different substrates. So the cactus was, you know, I wanted to see what can I grow in pure sand, just straight sand.

I got sand from the beach, filled a bag with that. And I figured, well, there are sandy shorelines, and there are also dune ecosystems. And maybe I'll try replicating that in a bag, in a container on my balcony.

And the prickly pear cactus has done really, really well. But yeah, some of the plants are just absolutely unbothered to be in a container on my balcony. Some of them are very bothered, they told me so right away.

Tina: Yeah, and then what, and then just quickly, what are you, you're masking them together and just leaving them outside in winter?

Ryan: That's right. Yeah, from the very beginning, my goal was perennial garden. I always wanted to have the plants live a full life and hopefully to express their entire life cycle, including flowering and pollination and setting seed.

And I wanted to be able to harvest and either share or, you know, let the seeds drop where they will and, and have baby plants too, a next generation. That was always my goal from the beginning. I didn't quite realize how unusual that is for container gardeners to have a four season garden.

And I truly do. So I mask my plants together. I usually pair them in ways that, or group them in ways that I see them growing in wild ecosystems.

So if I see gray goldenrod growing with heath aster, for example, together, I have those two in a container now and they play very wonderfully with each other here as they do in the wild. So for me, it's, it's always a memory and a reference to a real place that I've actually been to. And so when I look at, out at my containers, I look at each one of them and I remember those hikes that I've been on or, that place where I went to the cottage with my family.

And I saw those plants living together and, and thriving out there in that system. And something about the place made me think, oh, I think this could be replicated in a container. And I think I've got the right habitat to make it work.

Tina: Well, I need an updated video because I'm always in awe of your, all those wonderful little plants in there. And I've learned so much because you show them to us when they're two inches tall. And then I'm like, I can identify that now, right? I know what that looks like, tiny, tiny.

Ryan: I'm so glad you find that helpful. That's my springtime puzzle. It's, it's my favourite thing is in April, usually when I'm starting to feel the thaws are happening.

And I think maybe frost is starting to get rarer. I will uncover my container. So I cover them with a, an old hammock.

And under that I have a layer of leaves and I, I sort of gently pull the leaves back and I start looking for things germinating and, you know, winter basically completely wipes my brain. You forget what everything looks like. Of course I have the photos from last year if I want to cheat.

But what I really like to do is try to guess who's who based on those early, early leaves. And some of them of course are plants that are coming back that were just dormant for the winter. And some are seeds that are germinating either that I sowed in the fall or that just dropped from their parent plants before, you know, this is my extremely nerdy puzzle game.

I don't expect every new gardener to get into this, probably labeling your plants is a more sensible way to do it. But I just love that mystery of who's this going to be?

Tina: I know. Do you ever use your app and feel like you're cheating? It's like, come on, I should be able to figure this one out.

Ryan: Yes. Robotic assistance. I do go for that sometimes as well.

And you know, that does, that seems like the future and probably the present. I don't think there's any shame in that, but I do love the puzzle of just, and sometimes I'll draw them too. I'll actually, I'll use my hand lens.

I'm not a very good illustrator, but if you look up close at things, you'll, you'll notice little textures, the way that the hairs are arranged. Do they branch? Do they have a little gland at the end? Are they long? Are they wavy? You notice all of these things. And if you try to draw them, it sort of crystallizes. It forces you to really notice the differences.

And yeah, if you just spend some time with it, you'll realize there's a lot to observe, even in a very, very small space.

Tina: Hey, the first time I met you or saw you, you were working with the North American Native Plant Society at a sale or a booth. You were somewhere. Are you still helping them out?

Ryan: Yeah. Yeah. I'm, I'm a member and a volunteer with, with NAMPS. We call them the North American Native Plant Society. And they, I still credit them with getting me into gardening with native plants because at the time that I met them, it was at Christie Pits in Toronto at one of their May plant sales.

It was near my birthday, May 25th, my birthday. You know, they always do that sale on that weekend. And I think I was actually just walking out from birthday dinner and walking past the park and I saw these tents and I saw plants and I went, okay, of course I have to go check it out.

And this was, you know, I was well into my master's research at this point. So I had learned the flora, much of the flora of Southern Ontario at this point, but I really always thought of them as outside of the city plants. You know, I go out to nature spaces or maybe ravines to find these plants.

And lo and behold, here were these wonderful, quirky volunteers that were selling native plants. And I just, I immediately got it. I didn't even need them to explain it, but I remember it was Miriam was the first NAMPS volunteer that I met.

And she, you know, was just so cheerful and gregarious. And she was showing me all the plants and I go, oh, I knew these. I just, I didn't know that anyone would want to garden with these plants, but you're telling me that these grow in gardens and some of them even grow in containers.

And, oh yeah, absolutely. So try it out. I think I must've left with at least a half dozen that day. And then by the next year I was on the other side of the table. I was the one selling the plant.

Tina: That's probably when I saw you.

Ryan: That was, so they're a wonderful organization. I really believe in everything that they do. They put on great webinars actually.

Yeah, I think, I think I definitely still credit them with giving me that perspective shift from these plants belong in the wild to these plants belong in gardens. They belong with people and in the urban ecosystem as well.

Tina: Right. I think that North American Native Plant Society is a great place to start if you are on the shift, right? Because they have great resources, great webinars, like you said, really good speakers, and this plant sale every year. You can pre-order your plants. And I think they do it in two locations now, don't they, in the city or is it just the one now? I'm not sure.

Ryan: Yeah. So there's always one of the Toronto Botanical Gardens and it's still the largest native plant sale in all of North America. A wonderful place to be.

And yeah, the second one in Chrissy Pits has revived again this year. Yeah. So it had a little hiatus during the pandemic, but it's back and should be on again in 2026 too.

Tina: That's great. Okay. And I can't let you go without you telling us your wild bee story that you hinted at.

Ryan: My wild, wild bee story. So yeah, I mean, as we've been saying, like, I mean, one of the great joys of a habitat garden is observing the pollinators, the insects that come magnetically, even on the sixth floor, to pollinate and do their busy business amongst your plants. And so I've done a lot to try to give habitat features for bees.

So I always leave my stems. So I don't, you know, deadheaded compost. I leave hollow stems and I leave a leaf layer, as I've mentioned, and all kinds of different things.

But it turns out the greatest habitat feature that I've added to the garden was a complete accident. It was a stick, a walking stick that I found on a hike up on the Bruce Trail up near Blue Mountain. I just found this really cool looking stick on the ground and I went, oh, this would make a nice walking stick.

Maybe I'll bring it home and sand it down and add a little layer of, you know, varnish or what did I want to add? I just wanted to turn it into a nice walking stick. Okay. So I bring this stick all the way home from the cottage and I stick it outside and I start sanding away.

And then I forgot about it for a while. And then I came back and sanded it down a little bit more. I added my linseed oil, one layer, and then I left it out completely for the winter and again, sort of like forgot about it.

I said, oh, I'm seasoning it. I came back to it the following spring and I saw these holes in the stick that I didn't remember. I didn't remember seeing the holes initially, but I kind of went, okay, well, I guess maybe they were there and I just didn't notice them.

And then it was about, yeah, May, early May of this year, I noticed these little bees, small bees about the size of an ant, very, very dark, sort of black, almost an iridescent blue. And they were very curious about the holes and seem to be going in and out of the holes. So now I have to enlist my friend, Junaid Khan, who is my entomologist buddy, who I ask about any kind of bee or insect query.

And I, it took me a while, but I did eventually get a video of the bees. I sent them to Junaid and he said, you've got small carpenter bees, genus Ceratina, and there's a whole bunch of different species. And it turns out that they love, they usually like a stick, a small stick, but they don't like going through the thick, tough layer of bark, which of course I had sanded off of this larger stick.

So they saw it and they went, oh, yummy, perfect. And they, a whole bunch of them, drilled these perfectly round holes all over the stick. And then they go in and he told me in great detail, they, the mama bees, they go and they lay eggs and then add a little bit of pollen. That's sort of a fermenty ball of pollen bread. And then they seal it off. And then they do that again and again and again.

And then they, the mom bee sits at the final cell and seals herself off inside of the stick. And so there are, there are probably a dozen, maybe, maybe close to 20 of these holes, which each have a mama bee, a live mama bee who is just waiting in there for her eggs to hatch. And she can last in there for a full year without eating.

She'll check on her eggs. She'll wait for them to hatch. And then I just, every time I go out there, I check these sealed holes and I'm like, when am I going to get my bees? My bees are going to come out.

So that's my wild bee story.

Tina: That's very, very neat. Look at that. Bring a stick home from, from up north, right? That's amazing. Talk about creating habitat. That's great. I love this.

Ryan: You never know. As we say, if you plant it, if you plant the native plants, the wildlife and the habitat will come.

We just, we can't promise you how it's going to come. It will be a surprise, but we can promise you that it will come.

Tina: That's a great surprise. Hey, Ryan, thank you so much for doing this with me. This is so fun. And maybe I'll, I'll get you to come back if you'll, if you'll do it for me again, because this is...

Ryan: I would absolutely. Oh, consider me sold on that. Bring me back any old time. I'd love to do a Q and A at some point. Oh, if your audience members have specific questions, I'd love that kind of thing. Yeah. Bring me back anytime you like.

Tina: Amazing. Thank you so, so much. Thank you.