Story:
Learning about new plants is an exciting opportunity.
Sometimes a gardener is looking for a specific plant to grow in special spot in the garden, sometimes you want to create a look by texture and height and colour scheme, and sometimes you see something fabulous growing in a public or private space and you have to know what it is.
Often a quick look through a good botanical reference with pictures will help you locate the plant in question, but sometimes not.
When you come across an unfamiliar plant it can be difficult to guess what it is without knowing some of the botanical principles of plant identification.
Part of the job of a master gardener is to provide clinics for the public and in those clinics we do a lot of plant identification. It is not an easy job and we can't always determine which species of plant a client brings in, but it is always fun to try.
There are about 250,000 thousand species of flowering plants in the botanical world. When you bring in a plant sample to a Master Gardener clinic it is good to have as much information as possible in order to help you determine what your plant is.
If you know how tall your plant grows, where it grows (sun or shade), when it flowers, any kind of cultural information is very helpful. It is also advisable to bring in the whole leaf/branch and the flower (if possible) of the plant.
Plants follow a classification system similar to animals: kingdom, division, class, order, family, genus and species. As gardeners we are usually concerned with the last three.
There are certain key characters that separate species within a genus or one genus or family from another, and they are the characters that botanists use in plant keys (a whole other column).
But basically plant keys use a series of choices to lead to plant identification. They are set up so you can work through the main characters of a species, and in the end figure out which species you have. Example, are the leaves opposite or alternate?
This simple separation is actually quite significant. If you are trying to identify a tree species, only a few tree species, such as maple and ashes, have opposite leaves. You can immediately rule out a bunch of other tree species that have alternate leaves, like an oak.
The rules of plant identification and nomenclature may seem confusing and more complex than they are worth. By learning the basic rules and applying them to every day gardening gives the gardener a better understanding of plants and how they are classified.
