By Robert Graham, New England Botanic Garden
July 2024
With summer in full swing, many of our native plants, and garden weeds, are coming into bloom. This is a great time for ambitious individuals interested in learning more about their natural world to identify different plants. Plant ID can be a complicated and sometimes arduous task for beginners, but there are many modern-day resources that make it easier for individuals to interact with native flora.
The parking lot meadow features an assortment of native plants.
Native and naturalized plants, the ones commonly found in your own backyard or neighborhood, are the kind you would find in your beginner guidebooks. These guidebooks, however, only apply to those native and naturalized plants. When it comes to identifying plants in a garden setting, plant ID can be extremely difficult and, in some cases, not possible without proper planting records. The vast selection of plants available for use in a garden setting can make plant ID a daunting task, especially with the large variety of plants that are non-native in origin.
As part of the stewardship team here at the Garden, we spend a good portion of our time in our woodlands, wetlands, and meadows identifying the native, invasive, and naturalized species present on the property. This helps us identify rare species and their habitat. There are many resources available now to help beginners and experienced professionals with plant ID.
Resources at Your Fingertips
One of the easiest and most commonly used ways beginners identify plants is by utilizing plant identification apps. There are many options, but some are better than others when it comes to effective ID. Apple’s “Visual Lookup” search, for example, searches for similar images on the web and offers users an answer for what plant they are currently looking at. This is a simple plant ID method that many people have already built-in to their phone. For individual species that are easy to identify from an image, this option can work well. The major issue with this program is that it doesn’t include nearly enough search features for more complicated plants. The software uses AI to search the web for similar images. It does not accommodate for the region of the world the plant is in, whether there are multiple members of a plant family that look very similar, or if the plant is common in the area. Because of this, it’s not our top pick for proper plant ID.
Some better alternatives include applications like Pl@ntNet or iNaturalist. Both these programs are citizen-science based projects that use AI technology to pair up similar images with identifications made by other users. Users can also accept or reject others’ images based on those taken. Both applications also focus on certai