GoKawiilSO YOU WANT TO TEACH YOURSELF BOTANY…
I frequently get messages from people who really want to teach themselves botany and learn exactly where the fuck to start identifying plants and learning about them. The field is full of intimidating words (as well as some powdery stiffs, like much of Academia) and a confusing lexicon that can be a turn off to the layperson. I’m telling you this though - don’t be intimidated. With the internet, you have 24 hour access to the library. Use it. Ask questions. See a word you don’t understand? Look it up. Read about a concept that doesn’t make any sense to you (ie “what the shit does ‘monophyletic’ mean and why is it important)? Figure out what about it is confusing and ask the damn google.
That said, there are some key concepts you should understand that will make things a lot easier. They are:
Latin terminology - why do we use Latin? Well, because some dead guy named Linnaeus realized we need a universal system that scientists from multiple different cultures could use (at the time, he was probably mostly thinking of “white European cultures”, and while we can acknowledge how backwards and fucking goofy this is now, we can still admit that Linnaeus’ ideology was simply flawed like his time and NOT throw out the baby with the proverbial bath water. The fucker created a beautiful system, and it works. And that’s why we still use it. I say this because a few unthinking “performative leftist” nitwits as of late have decided to attack the science of taxonomy itself). Common names simply don’t work on a large scale. One common name (ie “cedar”) can refer to 8 different totally unrelated plants, where as Cedrus refers specifically to the genus which contains the species C. libani, C. deodara, and C. atlantica. When botanic names (or any organism’s name) is written in scientific nomenclature, the genus name is capitalized and the species name is lower case, and the name itself is usually written in italics. If you write a species name “Cedrus Atlantica” it is a dead give-away that you don’t know what the fuck you are doing. I was politely corrected on this point more than a decade ago, and I never hesitate to politely correct others. It’s like being courteous enough to tell somebody that they have a booger on their face.
Taxonomy : IS THERE A METHOD TO THE MADNESS? WHAT GIVES? - In short, yes, there is, absolutely, and it is so FUCKING cool. Why is it cool? Because we now group things according to how evolutionarily related are, and how they evolved. Once you learn the key concepts and traits that unite a family or a genus or a tribe, you can now identify members of that evolutionary grouping that you have never seen before. This is how I can see a plant that I have never encountered before and automatically know what other plants its related to, what family or genus it is in, and thus know what taxonomic group to search for it under (on inaturalist using the “explore” feature or with a key (flora), etc).