Reddit mentions of Botany in a Day: The Patterns Method of Plant Identification

This timeless, easy to read book is still one of my favorites and had wonderful reviews.

Botany in a Day: The Patterns Method of Plant Identification
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1892784351/ref=cm_sw_r_fm_apa_i_mC4LDb8VEQD66

This is a copy/paste of one of my comments...

I always recommend this; is to contact the local agriculture extension office or local community college of the area you live in. These local experts either personally know or they personally know who to contact regarding foraging info. Books by Samuel Thayer and Euell Gibbons are excellent, but they cover a very large area to be able to sell to a large audience. (Which is fine...)

But, most people spend 99% of their time in just one local area. Learn to key and classify the local plants here, and then all the sudden the other books in other areas start making more sense. https://www.amazon.com/Botany-Day-Patterns-Method-Identification/dp/1892784351 is a good book.

Also check MeetUp for any local groups in the area too.

• https://www.amazon.com/Botany-Day-Patterns-Method-Identification/dp/1892784351
  
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTsAFpSXj7Y <--- this guy is awesome

Botany in a Day!

I would check out http://www.botanyeveryday.com , and would also check out Thomas J Elpel's book Botany in a Day.


Botany and more specifically plant identification can be a little overwhelming. The best advice I got was to start at the Family level, learn the shared characteristics of the mint family (lamiaceae), mallows (malvaceae), etc. Then when you're out looking at plants you can at least know "Hey this is most likely a mint, I just don't know the exact species."

I highly recommend Botany in a Day by Thomas J Elpel.

It is an excellent book to give you foundational skills for plant identification. It isn't flashy but it has a ton of useful information.

I am a big fan of this book: https://www.amazon.com/Botany-Day-Patterns-Method-Identification/dp/1892784351

There's a lot more to foraging than just identifying the plant. Plants look different at different parts of the year. Also there are many plants that only have certain parts that are edible some of the time. Processing and making these wild edibles into a meal is another big part of of the puzzle. It can take years to really learn even a couple dozen plants deeply.

If you want to learn how to identify plants using pattern recognition I recommend the book Botany in a Day Its really well organize and easy to learn from.

I recommend this book too. It has a number of wild edibles that are very common and goes into great depth about how to identify them and when to harvest, how to process and even recipes. I also recommend the you tube channel Eat Your Weeds

They say that if you are as sure you know what a plant is as you are in identifying an orange then you can eat it. If you aren't absolutely sure then take the plant to someone who is.

One thing that I think is really cool about learning plants is once you learn to recognize a plant you begin to see it everywhere. I love foraging and identifying plants. Its a great hobby and the knowledge is really empowering. Good luck, have fun.

Yes, step one is learning to identify families. Another useful resource which stresses the family level is Botany in a Day. It's available in a handy dead tree version. It's most useful for native and naturalized North American plants.

I love this post and your book recommendation! This is also a great book for beginners in the world of botany and plant i.d.:

botany in a day

I also like the peterson field guides.

In my experience, unless you can go to a class or team up with someone more experienced, it is really good to start with plants that are unmistakeable (i.e. not plants that have look-alikes.) I began with trying to identify all the plants outside my house, and this was a great way for me to learn! Then I started trying to find plants I was interested in out in fields/woods (which was really fun: like a scavenger hunt!)

This is the book and website I use(d) in tandem to study and learn intro level botany. Its been incredibly helpful in my journey to learn plant ID of the southern Appalachian but is not region-specific. They both encourage the learning of plants by families.
http://www.amazon.com/Botany-Day-Patterns-Method-Identification/dp/1892784351
http://www.botanyeveryday.com/

Botany in a Day is great for this kind of stuff.

https://www.amazon.com/Botany-Day-Patterns-Method-Identification/dp/1892784351

Botany in A Day and Botany for Gardeners, which was mentioned above were both books that were used in my classes when I got my horticulture degree. They’re both very approachable and easy to understand and will give you a good basis for building your plant ID knowledge. I would also suggest familiarizing yourself with both native and invasive plants in your region and going out with a dichotomous key and keying some of them out.
Good luck to you!

You can begin by looking for classes for naturalists! Contemporary botany is actually mostly genome and molecular genetics and way out of my league and interest. Classical botany is more on morphological (physically observable) features like fruit, reproductive parts, stems, leaves, branching patterns, etc.

https://www.amazon.ca/Botany-Day-Patterns-Method-Identification/dp/1892784351

This is the book they had us get in our first year of school, great easy intro to it without blowing your mind too much. It's focused around NA, so the species might not seem as familiar

Fruit by Stuppy and Kesseler is packed full of gorgeous scanning electron micrographs (and other pictures too) and a lot of very detailed but very readable information. I can not reccomend it highly enough. Seeds and Pollen are also very good. I have not read it (just found it now, going straight on my wishlist) but The Bizzare and Incredible World of Plants, also by Stuppy is almost certainly excellent.

It's a bit technical and dry, but Plant Form, by Adrian Bell is one of my favorite reference books of all time. The information is fascinating, and the diagrams are gorgeous. There's a free online copy available (legal, I think) if you would like to have a look, but I would highly recomend a physical copy, and it's pretty cheap as far as reference books go. Flip through the section on Tree Architecture starting at page 296 for a sample of how cool it is. Read and understand that section and you will be amazed at the things you will start noticing about plants around you.

For plant ID, I can not reccomend Botany in a Day highly enough for a quite comprehensive tutorial in how to recognize plant groups (which makes it orders of magnitude easier to come up with a more specific ID). It's a classic, and is a required text for just about every field botany class.

Getting a good guide to your local plants that is based on dichotomous keys and diagrams rather than photos and learning how to use it is an absolute must if you want to move past the basics for IDing plants in your area. Without knowing your location, it's impossible to give good recomendations, but the Jepson Manual is a good example of what you should be looking for, and by far the best guide to California plants. Unfortunately these sorts of books are usually fairly pricey, and can be pretty impenetrable without practice (helps a lot if you already have a general idea of what it is), so you might hold off on getting one until a much later date. You can get older editions for cheaper, but at least in the case of Jepson's, most of the changes involve more diagrams and easier to use keys, so it might not be worth it.

There are loads of others that are slipping my mind at the moment, I will add them later if I remember.