Great article with elements of "how to draw an owl" about it.

  To be really good at botany is simple. Just learn how to be really good at {list of requirements which are themselves recursively complex and challenging, despite being written as one word like "learn"}

I can strongly recommend the mobile app Flora Incognita for quickly identifying plants. It’s made by one of the German universities so it’s free, don’t have ads, and don’t collect your personal data. I even showed it to my mum and she loves it

A friend from my youth always had an encyclopedic knowledge of plants, could identify them effortlessly just as we were walking around. I always envied him, but despite a love of plants, gardening, et cetera, I never went beyond a surface level until I started casually following Joey and CPBBD during COVID times. A big theme of what I've learned from him is how deeply geology is intertwined with plant evolution. Seems obvious once you hear it, but I genuinely never considered it until then.

At some point he taught an online course called "Blue Collar Botany" that went through plant ecology, evolution, identification, and other topics. It was fantastic, and finally got me into learning about the plants around me more rigorously. Years later, I still hear his voice in my head when I see certain parts of a plant like a laminar stamen. His affect is so unique that it actually helped me remember the content easier.

I don't know if he still teaches it or sells the videos from those sessions, but I would recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about the natural world around them.

Joey is also an amazing fine and graffiti artist (ALONE)

https://www.publiclandstore.com/blogs/gallery/joey-alone-exh...

He's great, I love his concrete botany videos about weeds thriving in harsh human environments. His tour of the Chicago River is great, and an NYC parking lot that has been taken back over by nature is fascinating.

https://youtu.be/SRRbspvheRc

https://youtu.be/AVPkBv-QQ6U

One of my favorite channels of all time on youtube. You get to see new places, learn amazing botany facts, local history, and experience interjected spicy opinions.

Watch this guy's YT channel - have been for years now. I think what originally caught my attention on his channel was a video specifically about the flora around run-down Oakland urban-industrial areas.

I know nothing about Botany, but I must compliment a good website and writing style when I see one.

> "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"

In the 18th century someone living in Europe making science books would definitely be using Latin, maybe French if you were a modernist, as that was the language of science publication and communication. I don't see how this is either backwards or goofy?

It's similar to use English on an internet blog post nowadays (as the author does), since there's many more Chinese or Spanish native speakers than English, but English IS the language of international communication.

The article actually is about botany, but the title reminded me there is a whole area that could be called "criminal botany". As in, there are specific plants that are cultivated for the purposes of criminal activity. And on the other side, forensic botany (things like analysing pollen traces)

That's a great title & look for the website, I'm tired of generic looks we see everyday, something like this excites me as I remember the old web.

Slowly killing my lawn. Red bud trees will soon forest my property.

I'm aware of this guy but the presentation is a bit full on for me. My buddy who is in to botany says apparently his podcasts are really good: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zJDjluBz6qVCGrF1I8JhP

I listened to his book, Concrete Botany[1], while doing my gardening last month. I really enjoyed it even as a long time watcher of his YouTube channel. I don't know if I could have read it because it does seem to drag on a bit but it was worth it for his narration.

[1]: https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9798317900410-concrete-botany

Love this guy!!

Woke Grocery Store (Whole Foods in Berkeley)

https://youtu.be/PUFQouwqbe8?t=180

Now this, this is the bargain, this is the bargain section.

Now shit gets a little hectic here, 'cause you get people, you get a bunch of hippies clubbing each other with the cucumbers, throwing shit, fighting to get, you know, the cheapest avocados.

But you get, like dollar thirty-nine for eight of these. They're about to go bad but, they're not bad yet. Still good, all kinds of good stuff.

You got little papayas and shit. Maybe a little soft, but still edible.

Okay but you get, again, sometimes you gotta wear a helmet when you come in there. Because it does, it gets hot.

There's people, just, it gets, I mean, you've seen, you know, on the outside they're soft, and they seems like they got nice soft liberal values.

But then they just start attacking each other, the claws come out, you know. I've seen a couple knifings in that room before, it's absolutely...

Oh look the berries! Physalis species. All right, who doesn't like solanaceae right there.

Golden gooseberries. I don't know what the fuck a gooseberry is, but that's a physalis. There you go, $3.25 for a basket.

[Watch the looks he's getting from people:]

Ok, so overall this is a wonderful spot to get talked down to, condescendingly lectured by a college student with a septum ring who can explain to you how you should think and behave and uh, and uh, you know, police your language.

Very uh, there's a lotta, there's a lotta lessons you can learn here, ok? You know. And if it wasn't for this spot, I don't know what I would do.

Now they, the got some guavas, they got some, I don't know where they hid the guavas at, but...

Now this is my favorite section, aka the hippie snake oil section, ok. Absolutely wonderful spot. [...]

Agreed. The author in question (Linnaeus) was from Sweden and professor at a Swedish university (Uppsala). Latin was used across the board in "traditional" sciences in northern Europe at that time and in fact the distinction of disciplines was not as clear as it is today. Linnaeus was a professor of medicine formally but focused on botany. He traveled a lot and had many international "contacts", especially in the Netherlands. His correspondence was usually a mix of Swedish and Latin (which I find interesting because I assume Swedish was not widely studied at the time) but his professional publications were in Latin.

But it was an interesting time as slowly native languages became more common. The chair for economic sciences at Uppsala was specifically to be taught in Swedish (1741).

Southern and central Europe were ahead of the curve a bit and it was more common to see French, English and German for example (French and English scientific journals date back to the 1660s).

For more information, I can recommend "Languages of science in the eighteenth century" by Britt-Louise Gunnarsson which specifically focuses on Linnaeus. It's Open Access: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/97831102...

Of all the things you could criticize as backwards in 18th century biology, the choice of using Latin is probably the silliest. It was the language of learning. It's a practical choice that you and I would make if we were transported to that time.

It's an interesting topic, though. If Latin is backwards because of assocation with European cultures, what are biologists nowadays proposing to replace it with? Some kind of universal coding system like ISBN or DOI?

The way I parsed the sentence, the backwards and goofy part is just the """he was probably mostly thinking of “white European cultures”""", not the choice of Latin. Just a concilatory disclaimer to avoid being cancelled for talking good things about someone born before the abolition of slavery.

Luckily the author continues with

> I say this because a few unthinking “performative leftist” nitwits as of late have decided to attack the science of taxonomy itself).

Simlish was intentionally designed to be linguistically neutral, so we didn't have to laboriously translate all the game audio into dozens of languages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simlish

For the same reason, botanical nomenclature should obviously be standardized in Simlish. Sul sul, Laganaphyllis simnovorii!

Laganaphyllis simnovorii is the scientific name of the Cowplant, literally suggestive of a plant that devours Sims. It first appeared under that name in The Sims 2: University as a Natural Science career reward. The Sims 3 Store also uses the full name officially.

https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Laganaphyllis_simnovorii

>This bizarre bovine vegetation is large enough to swallow your next-door neighbor whole. In fact, it WILL eat your neighbors. Your friends will be hard-pressed to resist the tantalizing vine-cake of the carnivorous Laganaphyllis Simnovorii. After it has consumed some prey, milk it for sweet, rejuvenating nectar of life. A swig of this liquid refreshment will add precious days to a Sim's life and wash away any regret they may have over their visitor's fate.

A proposed technical lexicon:

Plant: floragerb. Flora: floragerbia. Vegetation: verdigerbium. Fruit: pomofroob. Vegetable: olerinoob. Root: radixgerb. Stem: caulob. Leaf: folinurb. Flower: anthofleeb. Seed: seminib. Pollen: pollinoob. Spore: sporib. Cell: cellubo. Cell wall: muracellum. Chlorophyll: chlorofleebin. Photosynthesis: photofroobulation. Cellular respiration: respiragerbation. Germination: germinoobulation. Pollination: pollifleebation. Fertilization: gametogerbination. Transpiration: evapofleebulation. Xylem: xyloob. Phloem: phleebum. Stoma: stomabo. Phylogeny: ancestragerbics. Morphology: formagerbology. Binomial nomenclature: duonominoobulation.

More scientific lectures should be delivered with a blue collar Chicago dialect and accent.

Because latin was common only for part of one continent where he happened to be and not to the rest of the world while english happens to be spoken all over the globe due to a big goofy empire that went places.

However, let's keep out the culture wars from a post mainly about plants.