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 certain regions, so plants that aren’t known to exist in that region do not show up in the results. These programs are a great starting point for those interested in plant ID.
Using Field Guides to Strengthen Your Skills
Field guides are one of the best hands-on ways to learn plant ID. These books include the necessary information to make a fairly accurate ID. These handy resources typically include a built-in ruler for measuring plant parts and images with key terminology to help users understand plant descriptions. There are many different field guides, and each one organizes plants in a different way to help the reader identify them. A simple field guide to use when identifying plants here in New England is Wildflowers of New England by Ted Elliman and Native Plant Trust. This guide is organized by flower color and shape. To identify a plant, thumb through the pages of the color of flower you are looking at. You can then use the built-in ruler to confirm the plant’s ID based on the description of the plant and image that matches.
Some guides have photos and botanical illustrations, along with characteristics to help identify plants.
While this guide is great, I often opt for older-style field guides that include botanical illustrations of each plant as a secondary option for visual ID. Many times, line drawing artists use a combination of pictures and vivid descriptions to draw their plants. In some instances, this can give a more representative image of the plant than a single photograph. Another issue with photographs is they only show a single individual member of a species in whatever region that plant is found. Some species may have phenotypic diversity (Variation of appearance) based on multiple factors. This could lead to difficulty in plant identification. Generally, field guides include the more easily identifiable and common plants, so complicated issues such as phenotypic diversity are rarely, if ever, a problem. Some field guides will include both photographs and botanical illustrations. Examples of these include Grasses, Sedges, Rushes: An Identification Guide by Lawren Brown and Ted Elliman or A Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Trees by George A. Petrides and Janet Wehr.
Learning to identify the plants in your surroundings is a gratifying skill to develop, and in no time, you will find yourself curious about every single plant you see. Massachusetts alone has more than 2,200 documented plant species. Luckily, for those of us who are inquisitive about our surroundings, even after years of plant ID, you’ll always find a new plant to learn. Best of luck, and happy botanizing.
About the Author
Robert Graham is the Land Steward at New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill located in Boylston, MA. He has been with the organization since 2017 and is responsible for overseeing all formal groundskeeping as well as management of all naturalistic areas including meadows, woodlands, and wetlands. Robert earned his BS in Biology from Worcester State University where he focused on conservation biology and GIS. His professional interests include early successional habitats, native plant ecology, and sustainable land management.