On the weekend of May 14th, the Eldenbridge Institute teamed up with the Huntsville Botanical Gardens to present our Learning to See Plants class, which focuses on the fundamentals skills needed to start exploring the world of plants, botany, and wildcrafting. Instead of focusing on learning just a handful of specific plants, this class teaches students to see the basic patterns of a plant’s structure so that they will be able to leave the class with the confidence to pick up a field guide and start identifying plants on their own.
Many people just starting out with plant identification run into the “wall of green” syndrome, finding that they lack the basic pattern recognition skills required to pull the important details out of all the visual clutter. This class helps students create the search images that enable them to see past the wall of green and actually perceive the specific patterns that let them see the subtle differences between the different families of plants.
Identifying poison ivy
Students took home a graphic step-by-step guide on identifying broad-leaf plants created by Jesse, our media coordinator and resident artist. If you missed the class, you can still get yourself a copy as we’ll be sending it out in the next monthly newsletter. Sign-up for the newsletter here in order to get your copy.
