My sheet will ask you a short series of easy to answer, jargon-free questions about your mystery plant, and once you have answered them you’ll be presented with a list of possible families that the plant might belong to, in descending order of likelihood. For each family, the relevant pages are listed for each of the three books named above. Simply check each family in turn, going through every numbered page, and look for a picture that matches. It really is that simple! If you think you have a match but aren’t sure, mark the page and go back to it if you find nothing better. Alternately, type the scientific name into an image search engine and compare with the photos that come up!
I’ll go through how it works in detail below, but once you’ve got the gist you’ll find that it is fast and effective to use, and will also train you to recognise families. Students with no prior experience were able to identify over a dozen plants from scratch using this method in an hour and a half.
We begin with three quick questions, to eliminate distinctive groups, as shown on the flowchart above.
- First, if your plant is fully aquatic (i.e. floating in water or growing from the bottom of a permanent water body), go to the box in the middle bottom of page 2. There are four columns for water plants – one for those with large showy flowers (there aren’t that many!) and three for those with barely visible greenish flowers, and for these you choose a column based on leaf arrangement.
- Second, if your plant is woody, i.e. a tree or shrub, it is in the top middle box on the second page. Choose a column based on flower colour, flower shape, and if green/brown, whether the flowers look like flowers, form catkins, or have another shape entirely.
- Finally, if you’re lucky enough to find one of the special species with no green parts at all, which means it has no chlorophyll, then check the short list of families in the extreme bottom right of page 1.
