Botany in a Day: The Patterns Method of Plant Identification

This book ranks with such classics of plant indentification as Agnes Chase's A First Book of Grasses, or Donald Culross Peattie's books on tree indentification. Taking a bird's-eye view and then drilling down from there, it provides an overview of plant structure and evolution as well as many technical details relating to the structure and identification of plants. This would make an excellent first book for anyone wanting to know more about the subject. After this, you can try some of the more detailed field manuals and then try to get your feet wet with some of the real taxonomic keys. These require some knowledge of plant anatomy, but there's nothing that difficult about that, except that having a good memory is a help. But really, it doesn't take that much smarts and anyone can learn to identify the most common trees, flowers, and even fungi in their area with a little time and patience.

Botany in a Day provides an excellent overview to field botany. By learning plant characteristics by family, the reader can more quickly identify their plant by identifying the patterns each plant family presents. The book provides a page or two (or more!) on dozens of the most common families in the northern half of the US. Each plant family section contains additional information about the plant genera represented in this family. The keys to plant families allow the reader to quickly determine what section to turn to. This book is best coupled with a plant field guide to individual species that is grouped by family. You can use the Botany in a Day information to narrow your selection to the family and the field guide to identify the specific species. I highly recommend this book to both lay and professional people who work with plants.

This book lays out the general approach through which a beginner can make sense of the vast amount of information he or she faces in learning botany. I found it most helpful.

In the opening chapter, this book presents a wonderful simplified story of the evolution of plants, from a single cell to modern complex flowers. Both children and adults can gain a unique, intuitive understanding of this process from this explanation. My compliments to the author. He describes each plant family with interesting anecdotes and high quality line drawings. It's the first plant book whose lack of photographs didn't matter. Great tips for identifying families and individual plants have helped me enormously. Bravo!

Any interested in plant identification should consider Botany In A Day: The Patterns Method Of Plant Identification as an important guide. Thomas Elpel (Director of Hollowtop Outdoor Primitive School, Pony, Montana) deftly teaches the patterns method of plant identification, providing a method for learning about groupings of plants based on the idea that related plants have similar patterns for identification, and similar uses. Black and white line drawings accompany descriptions of different plant families and their identification processes.