Introduction to Plant Families

I offer these lessons to introduce you to some key botanical plant families that tend to be of most interest to herbalists. Learning botany slowly and by focusing on one plant family at a time can be quite helpful to hone our pattern recognition and develop our botanical lexicon over time, rather than be overwhelmed by a thicket of botanical jargon all at once.

Familiarize yourself with the characteristics of these families and the botanical terms introduced. Put them on flashcards or in a notebook as you encounter them. More importantly, go out walking and experience the plants, connecting the terms you've learned with your encounter with the plant.

Much of the information I provide in these plant family spotlights comes from the awesome book Botany in a Day by Thomas J. Elpel. I love this book and highly recommend it because it supports its readers in learning botany through pattern recognition. This means it relies first on our ability to open to plants and learn from them without having to know their names first. We just begin by noticing the shared patterns among different plants and eventually discover their connection to various plant families who share characteristics and patterns.

Learning plants by family is useful to herbalists because when we know the family of the plant we can also speculate some of its medicinal qualities, even if the plant itself isn't a known medicinal.

For example, Rosaceae (the Rose Family), includes many edible fruits we are familiar with, aand often has leaves that are astringent and fruits that are slightly sour (cooling) and astringent.

While plants within a family often share similar medicinal virtues, this is not always the case. There will always be exceptions. Read the 'rules' in each lesson as tendencies and not set in stone.