Despite its high prevalence, urinary incontinence is still considered a taboo in up to 60% of our Austrian test persons. The level of shame and embarrassment of urinary incontinence is significantly higher than that of depression and cancer.

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Societal Impact Statement The phenomenon known as “plant blindness” leads to a restricted view on nature, which may in turn result in people and society having less understanding of important environmental and conservation issues. Biology educators must tackle this problem directly. By exploring students’ interests in useful plants (spice plants and stimulant herbal drugs), we present a route by which educators could counteract plant blindness by taking students’ plant‐related interests into account when preparing a teaching unit. We reveal that educators must carefully select the plant materials used as examples in the classroom to effectively encourage plant vision in students. Summary The term “plant blindness” describes the phenomenon that many people tend to overlook plants in their everyday life. Therefore, they often do not understand key biological concepts to their full extent and may develop a more restricted view of nature. Here, we provide a possible method of counteracting plant blindness in schools by capitalizing on students’ interest in useful plants to impart botanical content in biology lessons. We investigated 172 students aged 10–18 years old in order to explore the links between students’ individual interests in spice plants and stimulant herbal drugs and their situational interest during an inquiry‐based botany teaching unit by using a questionnaire and additional semi‐structured interviews. Data analysis shows that, for students with low and medium individual interest, stimulant herbal drugs and spice plants can be used to generate higher situational interest. Furthermore, students with initially high individual interest should get the opportunity to follow their own questions concerning a plant group before working on a structured learning task. Using study objects from different subgroups of useful plants for introducing botanical content in biology lessons, and giving highly interested students time and space to follow their own interests, seems to be a promising way to counteract plant blindness and, thus, to help enable students to develop a more comprehensive view of nature.

The paper presented examines how useful plants can help counteracting "plant blindness" -a phenomenon leading people to overlook plants in everyday-life. Recent research indicates that people are most likely interested in useful plants, hence this group of plants could be used to trigger interest in botanical content in general. This study has investigated the structure of interest in five subgroups of useful plants (medicinal plants, stimulant herbal drugs, spice plants, edible plants, and ornamental plants). For this purpose, the FEIN-questionnaire (Fragebogen zur Erhebung des Interesses an Nutzpflanzen = Questionnaire acquiring interest in useful plants) was filled in by N = 1,299 pupils from grade 5 to 12. Data analysis shows (for all age groups and both genders) that medicinal plants and stimulant herbal drugs trigger high interest while spice plants, edible plants and ornamental plants raise only lower interest. However, mean values do not allow conclusions on an individual level (e.g. in a school class). In order to gain information about the interest structure in a specific target group teachers deal with in practice, we have analysed the interests on an individual level using frequency analysis of different interest types. Results show that stimulant herbal drugs seem to strongly polarize students, whereas medicinal plants are interesting for almost the whole sample. Eventually, medicinal plants turned out to be well suited to introduce botanical content by means of plants catching the interest of as many students as possible. Therefore, medicinal plants should be established as flagships counteracting plant blindness.

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