Light Eaters & the Mother Tree: Exploring What Plants Are and Are Not with Charles Smith [via Zoom]
Date/Time
Thursday, January 8, 2026
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Contact
potowmack@vnps.org
Categories
We rely on plants for food, shelter, and many other functions. We learn early that they convert sunlight to energy, but we often remain largely “plant blind”, allowing them to form a backdrop for our lives with little understanding or appreciation. This program will lead us on a journey to consider research and discussions over the last fifty years that have sometimes tried to assign plants human qualities, but have also discovered many things plants do that redefine what they are.
From “The Light Eaters” by Zoë Schlanger:
It takes tremendous biological creativity to be a plant. To survive and thrive while rooted in a single spot, plants have adapted ingenious methods of survival. In recent years, scientists have learned about their ability to communicate, recognize their kin and behave socially, hear sounds, morph their bodies to blend into their surroundings, store useful memories that inform their life cycle, and trick animals into behaving to their benefit, to name just a few remarkable talents.
Jewelweed employs cooperative strategies which avoid shading nearby siblings.
Yellow Jewelweed (Impatiens pallida) – photo by R.A. Nonenmacher license CC BY-SA 4.0 at Wikimedia Commons.
Charles is a native of Arlington, VA, and a naturalist and ecologist with 34 years of experience in natural resource inventory, planning, management and monitoring.
He has retired from Fairfax County where he worked for over 26 years managing natural resources and programs and most recently worked in the Stormwater Planning Division focusing on stream and riparian corridor restoration. Charles is a US Army veteran; board member of the Virginia Native Plant Society; and both a board member for the Large-scale Ecosystem Restoration Section and certified Ecological Restoration Practitioner with the Society for Ecological Restoration.