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Identifying Plants While Hiking:
Best Botany Tips For Hikers

By Diane Spicer

Identifying plants while hiking - sounds boring?

Or impossible?

Botany for hikers can be somewhere in between.

I'm here to tell you that you can easily learn over 100 plants, by breaking the process down into a simple stepwise approach.

Childhood interest, or adult hobby

You'll need a bit of motivation, of course.

Mine started in childhood.

As a kid knocking around in the woods in the upper peninsula of Michigan (United States), I learned a few plant names, mostly because they were unusual or useful:

• Dutchman's britches (the flowers really look like little pairs of bloomers)
  
• Bloodroot (we painted each other's faces with the red fluid from the stems)
  
• Trillium (gorgeous white lilies with extravagant green leaves, which I brought to my mother every year on Mother's Day)
  
• Trout lilies (speckled leaves, just like the flanks of a trout and lots of pollen to smear on everything)

But then...

I moved to the Pacific NW and my curiosity about wild plants exploded.

The mountains have waves of beautiful alpine flowers:

• early bloomers (avalanche and glacier lilies poking through snow)
  
• spring flowers abuzz with hungry pollinators
  
• high summer bloomers like lupine that perfumed the air
  
• the fall glories of asters and sedums
  

Gradually over the seasons I began to pick up a few names here, a few there, until it dawned on me that I should be doing a more thorough job of knowing my "neighbors" as I was hiking.

What if I needed them to get through an emergency bivouac in the woods?

Plus, who wouldn't be curious about a plant that can do this?? (glacier lily)

Can you relate?

So if you can relate to this hunger to know the names of the plants you see while hiking, here's a plan.

Hit the book store to get comfortable
with identifying plants while hiking

I started out by visiting the local bookstore, and haven't looked back since.

Here's how my Botany bookshelf today helps me with identifying plants while hiking:

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Field Guide to the Cascades & Olympics

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Medicinal Plants of the Pacific West

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Wild Plants of Greater Seattle : 2nd Edition

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This book is a great resource for
identifying plants while hiking

And here's my personal favorite: Botany in a Day (The Patterns Method of Plant Identification) by Thomas J Elpel.

This one is applicable to the entire United States, with different levels of reliability (a map is included, so you'll know how much confidence to place in the book).

Currently, I'm testing my ability to identify plants while hiking by placing each flowering plant into the monocot or dicot division, and then go on to see if it fits into 1 of 7 families:

• mustard
  
• mint
  
• parsley
  
• pea
  
• lily
  
• mallow
  
• aster
  

That's Elpel's approach, and I'm having lots of fun with it.

It's remarkably easy to figure out patterns in leaf shape, petal arrangements ... so to figure out what the heck a monocot is, I highly recommend his book!

Botany in a Day: Thomas J. Elpel's Herbal Field Guide to Plant Families, 4th Ed.

 More botany resources:
 websites

There are great websites with color photos that you can study, too.

Not as handy as a portable field guide, but definitely useful to compare your photos with after your hike.

• Use this one to get into very detailed databases.
• Here's a U.S. wildflower database that is rich in more resources for any region of the country.
  

A few field resources you might like
to add to your backpack

There are three small items that make my hiking botanizing much more pleasurable. Here they are:

• a lightweight hand lens
• laminated wildflower cards for your area, like this one
• waterproof notebook for notes
  

Happy plant identifying!

I'll be posting wildflower photos as they become available throughout the hiking seasons.

So check back often.

Or jump over to my Pinterest page to see some North American alpine flower photos taken by my husband and hiking partner, David Midkiff.

Thanks for visiting today!

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Identifying Plants While Hiking