Misc

-Note: If you’re going to eat one of these plants, please don’t rely on this site to identify it!

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Explanation of terms

This is a list of some of the terms used in the project, that non-experts might need clarification on.

Plant families

-Families are broad classifications of plant types, less specific than genus or species but more specific than order. Families often have many characteristics in common.
It REALLY helps your overall plant recognition skills to be able to identify what common family a plant is in. Families are referred to both with a latin name (usually ending with “ae”) and a casual name, usually based on whatever the most famous plant in that family is. (So the “sunflower family” is not exlusively sunflowers).

Genus

A genus is a group of plants really closely related without being exactly the same species. It is the first word of the plant’s official latin name (for example, Gaillardia aristata).

Common name

A common name is just the name people actually call a plant, as opposed to the official latin name (eg. “Dandelion” rather than “Taraxacum officinale”). There are often many names for the same plant, so it can get confusing-hence the universal latin name. Also sometimes common names sound weird as hell or are straight-up offensive (cough cough “Broomrape”)

There also may be a broader casual name for plants in the same genus, similar-looking group, or even broader family. For example, “Thistle”. That refers to dozens of similar plants, not all of which are in the same genus. But all thistles are in the Asteracea family, which is commonly called “the sunflower family”, but thistles aren’t generally considered sunflowers.
-I wasn’t able to narrow all of these plants down to the species level, or there may be multiple near-identical species that are closely related. In this case, just the genus is listed as (genus name) genus, or “various/unknown species”

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Plants I couldn’t identify: can you help me?

|Suspected Hawksbeard of unknown exact species, late April, near Chautauqua |Unknown type of wild parsely, lower Montane, August