I'm not sure I understand where you at ...

What level are these students at ??

In my experience ... the best way to teach plant ID is with the plant materials at hand ... live is the best ... or herbarium collections or get outside into the field. Get some magnifying lenses ... scopes and the pertinent flora ...

It's better to learn botanical plant ID terms a few families and some local plants then spreading to thin and learn a bunch of meaningless names.

Cultivated plants can indeed be difficult to ID with authority .. so it all depends what level you are trying to reach.

Images could be useful if carefully taken with a botanical eye and used to show pertinent botanical features used in identification ... and some plants are easier to ID from a photo then others ...

Sounds like some field trips are in order ... even a trip around your building or to a local nursery ??

Good Day ...

This is a college level horticulture class. Unfortunately, they aren't required to have ANY botany so I also have to cover a lot of the basics there... and do! As has been discussed in other threads, botany seems to be dying out at a lot of schools, including ours... but that's another topic.

I also teach the woody plants class and we get out once a week on campus and learn the plants first hand... up close and personal. We can cover close to 150 plants that way. We just don't have the diversity of ornamental herbaceous plants on campus to reach a reasonable number of plants.

I would love to take them on field trips and have but that can't be the whole basis for learning the plants because it's not practical to take them weekly. We have few local nurseries and, as nurseries typically go, they don't sell a very large variety of plants... right now you'd find a large number of just a handful of species. I have friends at botanical gardens 40 and 60 miles away but, like I said, the logistics are difficult to have that be much more than a once-a-semester trip.

Anyway, I recognized from the beginning that this wasn't ideal but that wasn't really the question... I knew the problems with that already. The question was how well this would transfer to the real world of live plants.

Your comments about how these "could be useful if carefully taken with a botanical eye and used to show pertinent botanical features used in identification" were right on and that does address the problem of visually recognizing the plants in the images. I started out with the idea that we'd all work off the same set of images and I found a CD by a another person in the state that was based on the text we use (not the text author) and could be carried in the bookstore. Turns out I wish I hadn't. They aren't clear enough or framed in such a way to use these kinds of features in most cases. NEXT TIME I will probably lean much more heavily this direction and use my own set of images given that live plants will not be an option for a number of years until we can get more diversity planted on campus. That's a project for other classes.

Thanks for the feedback and I hope to receive more feedback, either from The_Mohave__Kid or others!

You can always teach basics first - alternate vs opposite leaves, leaf margins, growth habit. Give examples of each type with whatever you can get your hands on. Make them draw/sketch your examples. Once you have a common vocabulary and some plants you can refer to, you can begin to describe plants you don't have in your lab. I have also found google to be a tremendously useful resource. Use the image search application and type in the scientific name - you'll have a much larger of detailed pictures instantly.

brooz, you are SO right about Google! I've stolen... I mean borrowed a ton of images from there. We have a CD to go with the text but the pics found on Google are often much better. I do try to give credit or a reference most of the time! :-)

"...You can always teach basics first - alternate vs. opposite leaves, leaf margins, growth habit. ... "

I have always found the sketch to be the best starting point in my own personal efforts to identify something. I still have a ragged old book called Vegetative Key to the Cultivated Woody Plants of the Salt River Valley which I refer to for sketches of anatomical structures, even in Texas it might be a handy reference on basics. (You can still buy it. It's online. But just capturing sketches from Google image search may be easier and less expensive.)

I love the idea of sketching for trees and shrubs to learn the ID characteristics but I'm less enthused for herbaceous plants, for some reason. I guess the difference is still we have nothing to sketch from. If we had live specimens, then we'd be teaching from that. Still, when I teach the woody plants in the fall, I do like the idea of requiring some sketching just because it's such a great way to remember it!

Thanks,

Brad

How about herbarium vouchers? They are a bit fragile so the local botany department might not what to loan theirs, but you could have students make them - maybe as part of the class, for extra credit or as a independent project. In addition to being study aids, they could be used in testing. A well-made specimen provides all of the details that you could hope to use in a class. An organization like the Botanical Research Institute of Texas might help provide instruction in preparing herbarium specimens.

If you cannot get to botanical gardens, consider trips to local nurseries. If you could start a teaching garden at the college, nurseries might help you with plant donations.

I agree that there is no substitute for having live plants. Are any of these suggestions workable -
1. Hold the class at a different time of year.
2. Contract with a local grower to produce the plants you need.
3. Have your friends at the botanical garden bring some plants to your classroom.

What I find most troubling is that you state that botany programs are in decline. And yet you are being asked to teach a class apparently without the appropriate resources or without requiring any helpful prerequisites for the students. This sounds like a recipe for failure. I realize you have not exhausted all of your options and I commend your effort. However, I don't understand why your department feels the need to offer this class when the plants aren't readily available. I feel that this will impede the success of the students, their enjoyment of the subject, and not provide much motivation to pursue botany further.

botanybob,

I am teaching horticulture classes and I teach the woody plants class the other long semester. That's more the foundational class for several reasons. I teach it every fall; spring didn't work because it took so long for plants to come out and we use more leaf ID, not so much stems/buds as in colder parts of the country. The class that was the subject of this thread is only taught every other spring.

In the fall class, I am able to cover a lot more basic botany that's useful for the hort students in terms of understanding ID characteristics, plant physiology, plant path, etc. We have an adequate number of woody plants on campus to go outside and see them up close and personal so I think this class works just fine. It is also required whereas the one I'm teaching now is more just recommended. Still, I recognize its shortcomings and don't want any course our students take to be inadequate. I'll continue to work on ways to improve this one, too. We have a several garden areas that we're working on developing so I think, in time, we'll be better prepared for this class.

As to the decline in botany, one of my friends who DOES teach botany at our university was telling me that they did away with the intro botany course so the only way that students can even be exposed to this info is in the intro Biology course which doesn't spend much time on botany anyway. As a result, for his advanced classes, he now has to cover more basic material to bring them up to speed. He was telling me that this is a trend all over because there's more funding available for other areas of biology - more "biotech" areas - so that's what people are getting their PhD's in and that's where the departments focus their resources.

Thanks for the comments!

Brad

I took two semeseters of herbaceous plant material at a local community college. We were limited to slides, and a few field trips. Fortunately, the instructor had a large collection of his own slides. I recognize that live material is better, but I feel I learned a lot. As I moved into a retail nursery situation, I was able to recognise much of the plant material that we covered in class.
I also took the plant info sheets the instructor handed out and found other pictures to paste onto them, so I was not limited to his view. I found his handouts to be valuable, as it reduced the notes I needed to take so I could focus on studying the slides, since they were not available outside of class. (I also learned to note pots and other things in the slides for plants I was having trouble with, since the slides were the basis for the tests)

He focused on the cultivated plants that are common in our area, and the ones he had success (and sometimes failure) with as a nurseryman, designer and gardener. Some unusual material was also covered. He used botanical terms for flowers and explained them, but for the most part kept it limited. No, we did not have to learn the differences between several salvias- he covered them as a group.

Anyway, the point is, I think it can work.

I taught a herbacous course at a local community college in South Carolina. I was fortunate. I arranged for the students to meet at one of several local garden centers for most classes. These businesses were extremely accomodating, even letting us come there for evening classes when their doors were closed.

We did have some classroom work, of course, since these folks required quite a bit of botanical and taxonomic work, as well.

Basic botany can be taught by the book, but anything worthwhile has to have real live examples to have impact. The junction between a leaf and the stem, the texture of the leaf, all reinforce the knowledge base.
Once you have that experience you can then go back to the books and appreciate the descriptions of the finer points of botanical differences.