Learn Plants Now!

Where do you start if you want to learn the name of a new plant? When I started out on this journey, an unusual feature of a plant would catch my eye - its flowers, or the shape of the leaves, or the location of its fruit. I would concentrate on this one feature, and then go through my various picture books on plants and try to figure out what I had.

As you can imagine, this was an inefficient process. I don’t, however, want to discourage you from doing this if you have the time. I became quite familiar with my books this way, and every now an then when I would see a plant in bloom for the first time, I would recognize it form the pictures I has seen.

It wasn’t long before I realized this approach to plant ID was very limited. So I bought a couple of plant identification books and set to work.

One of the first things I learned was to take the time to study the entire plant - not just the feature that caught my eye. I began to make note of leaf type and arrangement, for instance. I began to count parts - the number of petals and stamens, for instance.

But it wasn’t until I spent a few days walking around with a friend who is a professional botanist that I began to see the whole complex thing that a plant is. She always crushed leaves and smelled them. She noticed the texture of leaves and twigs, whether the plant has hairs or thorns, whether it exuded a sap or latex when a leaf was broken off a twig or the twig was snapped.

There were so many features to notice that I created my own plant profile sheet to take with me. I’ve made a copy of that sheet for you to download, and I’ll come back to it in a bit.

The other major point I learned from my friend - it’s also emphasized in some, but certainly not all, of my basic ID books - is that my first goal should be to learn the plant family and to not worry right away about the scientific name of the plant itself.

There may be as many as 250 to 400 thousand species of flowering plants, but there are only around 460 plant families (wikipedia). Focusing on plant families streamlines the learning process wonderfully, but there are other good reasons for learning plant families.

The word “family” itself implies a relationship between plants. The sort of relationship we see in today’s plant families are the relationships sought by early botanists who were, in fact, physicians. These early botanists, such as Nicholas Culpeper (picture) were looking at plants to study their potential healing properties, and it wasn’t long before they learned that certain groups of plants shared similar properties. If a plant was edible, then related plants were possibly edible, too. If a plant had medicinal properties, then related plants might also have medicinal properties.

How did these early botanists know that the plants were related? They didn’t have the DNA-analysis and other sophisticated tools used in today’s studies. They did, though, notice that if two plants shared certain combinations of physical features then they might also share chemical characteristics.

For instance: a plant whose flowers have 4 petals and 6 stamens, with 4 of those stamens being tall and 2 being short, is a member of the mustard family. Many plants in this family are edible (the brassicas, the mustards, nasturtiums) and others have various medicinal uses.

So, even without knowing the genetics of the plants, the early botanists were able to make some assumptions about their relationships.

The relationships among plants are being studied today as never before, with all the genetic tools alluded to earlier, and plants that were once grouped with a certain family may now be placed into a completely different family. No need for us to worry about learning all these shifts at the moment. I’ll use the current family names throughout this site, but if you find that the family name of a plant you see here is different from the family name in one of your books, then that will be the reason why. We’ll be coming back to this issue in other articles.

For your first assignment, you are going to place the plants in the area of your choice into groups based on their physical characteristics. You won’t try to learn their names just yet - the idea is to find plants that might be related to each other. You may choose your back yard, or a nearby park, or a woods or even a beach where you like to go walking.

Your assignment is in three parts.

Part 1: Print out the article entitled “19 Basic Botanical Terms.” Read through it first but don’t try to memorize all the terms until you go outside, article in hand, and look at some plants. Study the plant and find the terms that apply to that particular plant.

Part 2: After you’re familiar with the 19 Basic Botanical Terms, download the Plant Profile Sheet, a pdf file (when you click on the link, the file will be automatically downloaded to your computer - do not expect to see it in your browser). Print out several copies. Go back outside and fill out one Plant Profile for each of several plants. Be sure to include notes on odor, color, and other characteristics that catch your attention.

When you’ve studied and made notes on your plants, go back to your desk or someplace comfortable and compile your information. How many plants have similar characteristics? Did some plants have 3 or 4 characteristics in common but everything else was different? Does it appear that some plants are related and others not?

Part 3: Print out the article entitled “Start Learning Plant Families.” Read through it, paying particular attention to the Identification tips for each of the 5 families. Now take the results from your plant profiles and see whether any match up with any of the 5 families described in the “Start Learning Plant Families” article.

It is unlikely that in your first time out you will find all 5 families of plants described in that article. It is even possible that none of your plants fit into any of these 5 families. Don’t be discouraged! Leave a comment or question on the Comments page for this exercise. Another reader or I may be able to help you with the families that you have.

Please feel free to leave any questions on your exercise, or if you would just like to report what you’ve learned, please leave a comment below.

Enjoy!