Summer encouragement for aspiring botanists

Bees, hoverflies and other pollinators love Asteraceae (this is yarrow). CC image by TJ Gehling.

This year Katy is nobly allowing Taxonomic Collectioning to begin over the summer. This is rather good, as for the super keen it will open a much wider range of collecting options - not least, the chance to get interested in botany. Admittedly ferns and moss and wintery twigs already count as botany - and I like those things for their freakiness. But for the aspiring ecologist, it's a chance to get out and study some Normal Plants.

Last week I spent a happy hour roaming the campus with Student M, in search of plants in the Asteraceae. We found twelve. Considering the slightly eclectic list of 'how many to collect' suggests 8, this sounds like a successful afternoon's work. Of course, there's more to a good mark than finding specimens. But it's a good start. Imagine how many you could find if you kept looking as the months tick on. Impressively many. A mark of 80% beckons, surely.

Smooth hawks-beard (Crepis capillaris). It's not a dandelion. CC image by Jason Hollinger.

Lots of the Asteraceae don't seem very fussy about where they live, so you can find many on neglected bits of urban ground quite easily. We found:
 Groundsel, Ox eye daisy, Daisy, Yarrow, Scentless mayweed, Mugwort, Marsh thistle, Dandelion, Cat's ear, Smooth hawks-beard, Smooth sow-thistle, and Prickly sow-thistle.

If you are a complete beginner then you might feel overwhelmed by the number of unknown plants out there - do you have to identify everything you come across just in case it's Asteraceae? I think No. There's an obvious place you can start. Many Asteraceae have daisy-like flowers, with a ring of flat petals (really flowers in themselves, florets) surrounding a disc of shorter, tube-shaped ones. That means that if you see anything daisy or thistle-like, it's probably going to be Asteraceae. Most have yellow or purple flowers. You can worry about the weirder ones later.

How florets are typically arranged in the Asteraceae (CC image by RoRo).

I suggest you get hold of Francis Rose's 'Wild Flower Key' - I can lend you a copy if you are feeling the pinch of student finances. The drawings are very clear and the book is laid out in families, so all the Asteraceae are together and easily compared.

Once you've got a few common species under your belt, you'll start getting your eye in and soon a weird process will happen where you'll begin to notice if something is new and different, even if previously all "dandelions" looked the same to you.

Sea asters. CC image by Ståle Prestøy

A next step is to scrutinise the descriptions of the other species in the book - when do they flower, and what habitat do they like? I've just been on a field trip to a saltmarsh in Somerset (Steart Marshes - very interesting and with lovely views of the nuclear power station) and Sea asters were just starting to flower. They have purple florets and strangely fleshy leaves - they're a common enough species but you'll have to go to the coast to find one. So if you feel you're not finding anything new, go to a different habitat or wait a while for new species to flower.

But if I've learnt anything from scrutinising last year's marks, it's that you must take your field notebook with you when you're botanising. Take some descriptions of the habitat, draw a few sketches, write down your thoughts about why you're there and why the plants are there. It's easy to forget - but points here can mean the difference between a good mark and an excellent one.

I've previously written more about collecting and preserving Asteraceae, but do feel free to contact me if you want any help. My best and simplest advice is to squash them between labelled sheets of newspaper under a pile of big books. Positioning them on the newspaper can be annoyingly tricky - you want to get all the features displayed somehow. But you have slight lea-way in the first day or two for rearrangement. I had been trying to use a field press but cannot get sufficient squashage for long-term drying.