About

Ryan Godfrey

Botanist (B.Sc, M.Sc.)

I have an obsession…

I am over a decade deep into a journey to learn as much as I possibly can about plants and the ways that humans interact with them. I have examined this question from many perspectives: as a scientist, as a gardener, as a consultant, an archivist, a cook, an educator, an admirer. Always, I am the student and plants are my teachers. By continuing to learn, by sharing what I’ve learned and by applying it in the world, I think maybe I can push things just a tiny bit in the right direction so that many more generations of curious observers can enjoy this journey of infinite discovery. I think that is the part that I play: grow the obsession, share it around, spread the obsession. Then we can push together to make change happen.

I’m not sure exactly when this began, but my parents tell me that as a very young child, I would spend hours in the backyard with a tedious task (though I remember it fondly): vacuuming acorns into a shop-vac. I have a fuzzy recollection of dappled shade above, cool wet grass below and the satisfying “thunk!” that accompanied each successfully inhaled acorn. Maybe having this and so many other green memories laid the foundation for the botanist I would become. Or maybe that great old Oak cursed me with an insatiable void of knowledge in return for stealing so many of her offspring. I will never know for sure.

What I do know is that science has always been a big deal for me. Bill Nye and the Magic School Bus got me going and I never turned back. Discovering the patterns in this world by asking good questions and addressing (as best I can) personal bias: that is how I learned to learn. And then I asked “Can I use what I learned to change the world?” I grew up in a generation that became painfully aware at a young age that our parents’ generation and the generations before them had set in motion a big change in the world and it’s not a good one. I was part of the cohort that would have to clean up the mess. I once believed that science was the only way to do this. I now see that science is one part, and the knowledges of diverse humans and non-humans (including plants) will need to work together to find the path to a positive future and start walking it.

In my undergraduate at the University of British Columbia, I had a few truly amazing mentors, most of whom were botanists. They got me going down a path with the trail marker labeled “the botanical world.” I started seeing, as they say “the forest for the trees” gaining what I call “the eyes of a botanist.” Then I could start learning from plants as well as people. I asked the question “Can I make a living doing this?” and decided that I should try. In this role, I knew I would have a few options: work in academia, in the government, in industrial consulting, or at an environmental NGO. Being an experiential person, and too young to make up my mind, I decided I could try each one on for size and fit and see where that got me. So I did. I got a Masters degree in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Toronto, I interned at the Royal Ontario Museum and the Royal Botanical Gardens and I now I work at the World Wildlife Fund Canada

I found more career paths and more amazing botanists along the way and I’m still on that journey now. I’ll stay on it until I know I can’t do it any more, or until the end of me. In the meantime, I learned how to give “botanist eyes” to other people, just as my mentors gave them to me. I’ll give them away to as many people as I can; maybe you’ll be next.

Plant Stories

Narratives from the Botanical World

Plants are Everywhere!

Take a deep breath, or a bite of food, or touch a piece of fabric, or furniture, or put some fuel in your car, look at the ingredients on you medicine bottle, or open a book, take a look out the window or a walk down the street and you will be interacting with a plant (probably several) in one way or another. Here's a challenge for you: go one day, just 24 hours, without any plants. Let me know how that goes.

Even though plants surround us all the time, and we owe so much to their efforts, I have found that most people don’t pay them much mind. I think the least you can do to appreciate all the ways that you benefit from plants is to learn a little bit about them: learn their names, what they like, how they reproduce, where they came from and what might be threatening them. That’s what I do every day and it takes me to such fascinating places. When I share stories and conversations from the botanical world, it is really a form of exploration. My goal is to open your eyes to those green things that you pass by every day without wonder. Take a closer look: there is something fascinating to discover!

Every Plant has a Story to tell

There are well over 300,000 species of plants that we know of on this blue-green, rocky, spheroid spaceship we call Earth. Each species his its own history: it has ancestors and distant cousins and mortal enemies, complex survival strategies and partnerships with other species. Individual plants may not speak a language that we can understand, but they can move and grow and react and sense their surroundings. They are born, put out their first leaves, become sexually mature, they can be mothers and fathers (often both at once!) and they have siblings and friends. Plants get diseases, suffer wounds, carry scar tissue and, of course, they die (though some would seem to be immortal). If they could tell us their stories, what would they say? It’s something I love to think about. Maybe if I learn enough, I’ll be able to tell some of those stories. I can certainly try.

Plants are not the only ones with Plant Stories, though; people have them, too. We always have. We may have forgotten a lot of them, but when you start seeing them, you’ll see them everywhere. How did humans shape staple crops they used to feed civilizations like corn and rice and wheat and amaranth? Where did the wild ancestors of the foods you love originate? Why did we obsess over blue dye, whether from indigo or from woad? How did we turn the poisonous fruits of deadly nightshades into tomatoes and bell peppers? Why might someone with a reaction to poison ivy also break out in hives when they touch a mango? And why is it that a living space doesn’t feel “complete” without a potted plant, even a plastic one? Don’t forget, even that plastic was a plant, once. You just can’t get away from them! So you might as well learn what they are.

Start simply by touching a plant. Feel the textured bark, smell the leaves, examine the way its branches twist and listen to the stems swaying in the breeze. Get to know just one plant and your journey will begin. And don’t, worry most of them don’t bite.