“Botany is the science in which plants are known by their aliases.”

Ah, the quote above is so true. (The quote is anonymous but I found it here.)

If you’d asked me 9 years ago (9!!) when I graduated college that I’d be working with plants more often than not I would have probably laughed. After all I was a marine biology major! Now, that’s another rant into itself, marine biology, but don’t think you will get a great career in it unless you go to grad school or are willing to scrape by at cheap paying jobs. But, I did focus on wetlands in college and of course, here I am in wetlands. Except that all the plants I learned in college and the ones I picked up in Florida are for the most part not in the habitat we are working in. So, that means it is time to learn new plants and we learn new ones daily. I have new plants coming out my ears!

Now, I shun grasses. Grasses are a p.i.t.a. and if I didn’t have to figure out which one was what, it’d get labeled a grass and maybe a pretty grass if it was pretty. Now I am beginning to throw sedges into that arena. Screw you sedges!

The best part though is figuring out a plant on my own, either based on previous knowledge and deducting from that or by figuring it out based on the ecosystem it is in.

And as the quote above says, there are many names for plants, sometimes two scientific names because it was recently changed and the nomenclature is still around. Which is annoying when you talk to someone who knows it by another name and then you get all confused. And gah, forget blackberries, they are becoming as annoying as grasses and sedges—there are tons of them! They have thorns and bite—it’s a blackberry! Do I really need to know which one it is?

But, eventually I will get better at it and might be able to spit out names. I prefer to get in a habitat with only a few types of plants and really learn them before I move on, but boy, if you get in a mixed area of up and wetlands, forget it! There might be a great diversity!

In other news our geocache The Ghost Orchid made it to geocache of the week on the geocaching blog. A good time to tackle it would be now, which is typically the drier time of year in Fakahatchee.

You can also listen to Ringleader from The Traveling Circus on a blog radio show talk about the AT. Good stuff!

Meet Your Neighbours links professional photographers in a way that also shares the natural world in their own areas. Pretty cool!

I think that’s it. Sometime between work, sleep, and eating I’m going to manage to work on at least one more Trail Tales post and a few more Texas Wildflower posts.