But It All Looks Green

Botany has been described as the ‘pattern method of plant identification‘.

Which is why we have wild flower keys.

But if you’ve ever looked at a flower key, you might be forgiven for thinking that you need a PhD or a piece of paper from a University in order to get to know plants.

Not so. As I’m going to show you.

Plus. I don’t know about you. But in the early days, all that science stuff just left me cold.

It reminded me too much of the unbelievably boring classes at school. Much of the time listening to things that I just didn’t get anyway.

So when I started teaching foraging, I wanted folk to be brought deeply into the mysterious world of plants.

So I teach people how I learned plants.

Botany is fantastic. Don’t get me wrong.

But I noticed when I started travelling and meeting traditional cultures, that there wasn’t a single botanist amongst them.

Yet they knew plants at such a deep level, even a high-ranking bot-head at Kew gardens would have had a hard time keeping up with.

So what was different?

What was different between the way a scientist learns plants, and a member of an indigenous tribe with no botanical knowledge?

I’ll expand more on that a bit later on.

For today, we are going to do as botanists do.

We’re going to pay attention. Look and observe.

And to do this we are going to find a plant.

I’ve been wondering which one.

I mean so many plants only show themselves at certain times of the year, right?

So we need a plant that you can find any time (usually).

And it needs to be one that you know.

One that’s been burned into your psyche since you were a child.

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