I do not understand people who aren't good at identification confidently being wrong. Like, someone in one of the gardening groups I'm in posted a picture of an aronia, and someone said it was a blueberry! And someone else said it was a crowberry!

No! Why are you confidently saying things when you're objectively wrong!?

And then I said it was aronia and pointed out the differences.

And then someone said it was a huckleberry!

No! The huckleberries around here are vaccinium, time same genus as blueberries and thus same the very same structures that show it is not a blueberry also show that it's not a huckleberry! Why are you like this!?!

This is almost as bad as that time someone misidentified a potato as a dahlia.

Saw someone confidently identify a cluster of jack-o-lantern mushrooms as chanterelles the other day

Bro you glowing yet

An uncomfortable amount of people rely really heavily on plant ID apps or rely on AI search results and it shows.

Old trauma reactivated. When my daughter was ten her class went to "Outdoor School" for a week, and I went along as a parent chaperone. There was (and is) a STUNNING campground site run by the 4H in the next county west of us, up on the Appalachian plateau. Think bogs, carnivorous plants, old forest, all sorts of good stuff. One day they hiked the kids to a bog area that was dry enough at that time of year to walk on, and the "expert" they brought in to lead the hike was expounding on the plants. "This," she said confidently, as she pointed to a mountain laurel, "is a blueberry bush!"

My daughter, an experienced forager even at ten, looked at me in horror. We were both just frozen. Do we point out that this woman is flagrantly WRONG? There was a small blueberry bush with a couple late berries hanging on it very close by! There was a cranberry bush, with a couple cranberries on it, very nearby, which she utterly ignored until we drew her attention to it. It was very upsetting.

I won't talk about the other hike, where the instructors identified some lycopodia as "baby pine trees" because it still makes me cry, nine years later . . .

read interesting paper a while back discussing how urban weeds are evolving similar adaptations to plants that live on remote islands, specifically to have seeds that disperse less because they are surrounded on all sides by inhospitable areas

Cities form their own unique environments with their own characteristics, but tend to be separated from each other.

Imagine, then, cities each evolving their own weird endemic species just like islands do...

That makes me think of this article from The Guardian

Osmundastrum cinnamomeum

   Last summer I learned that you can find an unusual fern on a hike, look carefully and closely at it so you can look it up later, look it up in a fern guide, try googling it seven different ways using clear botanical terms like “doubly compound leaf” and “bipinnate”, and NEVER find what the big, impressive damn fern is named until you run across a TUMBLR post. Whereupon you spontaneously yell CINNAMON FERN GodDAmmit! and have a brief display of Temper.

   Peterson Field Guide to ferns DOES have cinnamon fern, but the subleaflets in the scrupulously-detailed drawing are pointed, and this specimen and the one I saw in West Virginia were rounded. Argh. She says bitterly.

   If I may, a good place for Anon to start would be a local public library in the non-fiction section, Dewey decimal numbers 575-588. While the list below looks very formal and ‘sciency’, the actual books on the shelves will be written in a wide variety of levels and formats - you could browse through and pick something that looks reasonable and to your taste.

art telephone week 2 is a big shout out to NITROGEN FIXATION and FRIENDSHIP

Oh. Daffodils. Daffodils, DAFFODILS!

My mother had just a couple puny bulbs when I was a child, and I wasn’t allowed to pick the few flowers that bloomed every spring. When I moved to my own place I sent away for the biggest, most inclusive set of daffodils bulbs that the Dutch Bulb Company offered. I dug holes every-damn-where. I planted A LOT of daffodil bulbs. And then I waited patiently (LIE I fussed and fretted all winter about it) for them to bloom in the spring.

My goal was A) to have enough to pick big bunches for myself and B) to have enough for my kids to be able to pick however many they wanted when I actually had kids.

When I did finally have kids, some years later, the daffs had done their thing and multiplied into a Horde. We could pick all we wanted. For a two or three-yr-old, picking flowers and then smushing them or picking the petals off is a fun activity. And why not? Why not enjoy the flowers by smushing them and reveling in daffodilly fragrance? Heck yeah. Go for it, kid.

  And I know no one asked ME my favorite monocot. But in January, I have strong feelings about daffodils.

Botanicals, Plate 18: Buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis), also referred to as honey bells.

I found some of this in late summer two years ago and was blown away by how cute it was. It’s theoretically native around here (Maryland, USA) but rather rare, and the bush doesn’t look like anything special unless you see it blooming. Now I’m hoping to cut a few twigs and establish a little colony of them here by my creek. They are. So. Cute. Wetland plants are generally easy to start by rooting cuttings      *fingers crossed*

About a hundred years ago, ok, maybe 2005-ish, I used to get a magazine called Babybug (yes, published by the folks who do Cricket) that had a lovely little poem about this. I was so impressed by it, because it had stanza after stanza of really good rhymes about every part of a plant that we eat. The little bit I can remember is . . 

“Celery, asparagus, what about them? We eat the stem! Peppers, green beans and okra are odd We eat the pod!

And do I end up mumbling bits and pieces of this poem as I’m gardening? Even all these years later? Yes, yes I do.

The Japanese Lantern plant, also known as the Chinese lantern or winter cherry, is a popular symbol of ‘life within death.’ It blooms in the winter, but when it dries up in the spring, the ‘skin’ crumbles away, revealing the red fruit that lives inside its ‘skeleton.’ The seeds are also used as offerings to guide the souls of the dead. Source Source 2

The wild variety that lives in my area is also edible and delicious. You can find them, sometimes even under snow in winter, and have a taste of fresh berries.