Love plants? Love botany? Want to make a career out of it? Well Dr M has, with his interest and love of plants dating back to age 11 and no doubt before, though currently Dr M’s memory banks don’t allow much recall prior to age 11!
Dr M spent a long weekend in the English Lake District by Wastwater, the deepest lake on the Lake District and just down the road from Scafell Pike which reaches around 1000 m and is shown here hidden in cloud.
Why not get out and see some botany this weekend? You know you want to!
The Botanical Society of the British Isles website is an excellent place to start or continue you botanical meanderings. BSBI online provides wealth of information about plants, plant recording and links to other resources. Here Dr M provides a pictorial flavour of what is on offer but visit the site, check it out and use it!
There are a growing number of online forums and communities providing free help with plant (and other wildlife) observations and identification. Dr M has already posted on the NHM Nature Plus Plants” community, here Dr M checks out the Open University’s iSpot community.
This key is listed by BSBI (Botanical Society of the British Isles) as “A free and easy online key for beginners, by Quentin Groom“. So here, Dr M gives it the once over. It is undeniably free, but is it easy? And, more importantly, is it accurate and useful?
As the University teaching term gets closer Dr M has been investigating plant ID aids which might be tested by his students and some of which might even be useful! Here Dr M has a look at an interactive key from the Science and Plants for School project (SAPS), Cambridge University.
Geraniaceae includes around 800 species in 7-10 genera World-wide. The most important genera are Geranium (Crane’s-bills – 430 species), the garden Geranium (Latin name = Pelargonium – 280 species – native to the Cape region of South Africa) and Erodium (Stork’s-bills – 80 species).
Question: How many native conifers are there in Britain (conifer = seed plants bearing cones rather than flowers)?
Dr M has previously posted here about “Imagining Science” a living Science-art collaboration. The next collaborative project for Reading Science Week 2014 is entitled “Symbiosis” and is about art-science relationships and uses lichens – the weird wonderful complex plant-fungus dual organisms – as a source of inspiration!