Botany & Identifying Wild Plants Correctly

Gathering wild plants, or wildcrafting, is a skill that not everyone has the opportunity to implement in their daily life. However, if you are fortunate enough to live next to a forested region with lots of greenery, it would behoove you to learn some of the skills required to wildcraft. After all, many plants are useful for humans, adding elements of health and nutrition to their diet.
But, not all growing things are safe for humans to ingest, or even touch. Some, also look like one another.

Fortunately, there are many venues for obtaining wildcraft skills. Many institutes of secondary education offer botany classes. Although these can be a bit heady, focusing on the evolution of plant-life and the classification of various plants. Options that include a lot of pictorial data, of which there are many online venues, are a good idea. It’s important to develop an eye for the visual details of plants to identify them like a pro. There are a lot of tells that will help burgeoning wildcrafters. Things to note when finding a new plant include: the plant’s environment, the leaves’ size, number, shape and color and texture. Is it veiny? Is it a climber? When does it grow? The more data you gather before gathering your plants, the more certain you can be of collecting the plants you want.

Key Takeaways:

You can learn to identify both useful and dangerous wild plants by closet observing the shape, size, color and arrangement of leaves, flowers and stems.
A good botany or wildcrafting course should include lots of information about how to identify different plants, and how humans interact with the natural world.
The much-feared poison ivy is a vine with a trio of wide, spoon shaped leaves that often laces through other plants near sources of water.

“When I was in university I actually took a botany class. It was a little overwhelming to learn how to classify plants and look at tiny slides of plant cells under microscopes for classification. That’s why I really loved the online botany and wildcrafting course from the Herbal Academy of New England. It was a delight to study from.”