Pursuit of botany starts off innocently enough: maybe you are a gardener interested in learning about plant biology, maybe you are a survivalist wanting to learn about edible plants, or maybe you are a wildlife lover who wants to attract hummingbirds to your yard. Whatever the reason, you need to make sure you are fully prepared for the havoc you may wreak upon your life. Before you read that gardening book, click that link, or go to that native plant conference, take the time to educate yourself about the hidden dangers of botany:
- You can’t un-see the scenery.
Like walking in on your parents, plant identification is one of those things that you can’t un-see. Before you learn about botany, the world around you consists of only vague categories of greenery. Afterwards, plant scientific names practically scream themselves at you every time you go outside. Sure you might feel “more engaged with the natural world” by knowing how to properly address the surrounding flora, but once you learn those names, you will never be able to traverse the countryside in blissful botanic ignorance.
- You increase your risk of accidents.
Your new-found plant identification skills will also put you at greater risk for bodily harm. You may skin your knees while climbing logs to photograph ferns. Wildflowers off the side of the road may catch your eye and cause you to swerve your vehicle dangerously. Even on the water you are not safe. Plants along the water’s edge will call you like sirens, and threaten to entrap your kayak on snags.
- You will start to hoard plants.
Each new group of plants you learn about will become The-Most-Awesome-Plants-Ever and lead to a cycle of never-ending garden expansion. Sure gardening is great way to exercise in the great outdoors, but you will always be tortured by the desire for “just one more plant.”
- Your relationships will be strained.
Once you learn a bit about botany you will want to share some of your knowledge with your friends and family. Occasionally, you may wow them with fun facts about some unusually useful/poisionous/carnivorous plant, but most the time you will simply become a source of exasperation. Your friends will roll their eyes as you point out (yet another) wildflower on your walk together, your significant other will sigh as you bring home (yet another) species of plant to add to your over-brimming garden, and your kids will become annoyed that (yet again) you are taking so long looking at all of the plants. While vacationing, more fun loving people will want to go to overpriced theme parks, but you will be torturing your family and friends by suggesting (yet another) trip to a botanic garden.
- You will want to learn more science.
Botany is the ‘gateway science’ to obsession with a wide range of natural sciences. Once it has you in its clutches, botany may start you off on the path to wanting to learn entomology, ornithology, or, Lord-forbid, mycology. It may even send you off into the esoteric realms of soil chemistry or meteorology. The madness will simply compound itself.
If, despite all these dangers, you still want to pursue botany, go right ahead. Learning botany may indeed help you grow prize-winning dahlias, get free food from your yard, or become a better steward of the earth. Just know what you are getting into, and don’t say I didn’t warn you.
The Biologist's Garden 
Spot on. Fabulous. My husband will now understand, thanks to this delightful account of our problem.
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OMG. I am not alone.
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Yep.
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So true
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Mark Twain on Life on the Mississippi had a similar rumination on the conflict between knowledge and beauty.
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All very true. I don’t understand why everybody doesn’t think it’s fun to find the botanic garden whenever you visit a new city!
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They forgot a few:
You can’t watch a movie if the plants don’t match the place where the story takes place… A movie about New England should not have native California plants in it!
You can’t go home again because all you see are invasive exotics all around you!
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So true!! 😂
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and if things that don’t bloom at the same time are blooming at the same time….oy! i even have this
problem at the flower show! 🙂
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I am totally and proudly guilty as charged!! Got a life sentence with no hope of parole 😀
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Omg yes this!
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Egads, that’s me too!
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Not to mention mysteries solved by plants parts that aren’t right!
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If this isn’t me, I don’t know what to say, ha ha! I am still learning plant ID-ying, but on walks and hikes, I feel the endorphin surge as I recognize plants that I remember. And the hoarding…well, thanks for the write up. It is good to know one is not alone.
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So true! Brilliantly hilarious.
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OMG! This is me!!
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You know it’s over the top when you just have to share – with anyone who will listen – your amazement at what going on with mycorrhizae.
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I could totally identify with all of these things!
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This is so accurate a description of me it’s almost uncanny, including ‘entomology, ornithology, or, Lord-forbid, mycology’. I’m adding in geology and palaeontology for good measure. Love it!
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I actually started with entomology (I am an entomologist) and innocently decided to take a plant ID course to help with my PhD work. Well…there went all my spare time!
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Ahahahahahahaha! Ahahahahahahaha! Oh, this is soooo me. Wish I had a penny for every time I looked in the rear-view mirror in the spring only to see a long line of cars behind me because I’ve slowed to a crawl. Massive bonus points for using Legos! You might enjoy seeing what my Lego Loki has been up to. He frequently posts about my “stupid” plant habits…
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This post really hits the nail on the head. My fear is getting stopped for a minor traffic violation and the officer wonders why my vehicle is littered with dry plant leaves!
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This is so spot on. When your wife forbids you to use scientific names with your young kids, common names only allowed, you know you have the Botany bug bad.
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DaHlia.
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Ah, thanks for catching my typo. It has been corrected.
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I ve been a horticulturist for 20 years and the green around us still amazes me…and yes it does get you in trouble sometimes…and friends get tired of hearing you babble of in latin naming bromeliads and such…but its a daily adventure for me….
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So how many have sped past a plant at 70 mph and then made DH get off at the next off ramp so you could go back at a slower speed?
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“…or Lord-forbid, mycology”. Uh oh…I’m there.
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That uncomfortable moment when your friend asks what that plant is and you blurt out “Leucophyllum frutescens!” of “Texas Sage”…
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What about when you lose your hiking buddies because it takes you about an hour to go a 1/4 mile. I just don’t understand why they don’t want to look at spores!
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We call it “traveling at the speed of Botany”.
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Great Article 🙂 Very comical, yet true. I too have become obsessed, mainly with terrariums and air plants.
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LOL!!!! Love the lego illustration, well done! & so true. I’m especially guilty of botanizing at 100km / hr. And of walking too slow on a path. Also when i field trip on my own i take pictures of our car in the most precarious positions to bring back hone to scare my husband (navigating between 2 ft ruts in the road, water up to the door from swamps and streams that have taken the road). Thank you for validating my expereince :D. PS: Your post also reminds me of two quotes:.
Acclaimed poet and novelist Elizabeth Smart tells how gardening madness struck her suddenly in 1967 “like a cold or an unsuitable love affair.” – Alice Van Wart
Had I ever, until that moment, seen flowers at all? – Gabrielle Roy
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The dangers are real. Do not underestimate the power of botany addiction over your life.
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OMG! I’m not alone! This is great teaching material and I hope us plant nuts will make good use of it! I’m teaching an intro to native plants tomorrow and will use this to begin the process of indoctrination. Thank you for writing this up!
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Despite the current fad for “geekiness” being fashionable, it only seems to extend to geeks who are into technology (maybe biotech) but not botany. Sigh. Well you have diagnosed my condition accurately anyway!
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I studied botany, forest ecology, ichthiology and ornithology….. And, I pretty much remember every scientific name I’ve ever learned, even as far back as 37 years ago…… I’m now just an abnoxious geek :)!
Many thanks to the LA Woman for sharing this excellent article….. may your Artemesia peacefully coexist with your Celtis and Cercocarpus!
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“Your new-found plant identification skills will also put you at greater risk for bodily harm.” Scrambling down a steep hillside to photograph some pretty foliage – ooops, that was the left medial ligament that just tore . . . and I’m only 10km from the car . . .
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Love this post! This is me. All. Day. Long! Thanks for the laughs and relief in knowing I’m not the only one!
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Thank you for the best laugh I’ve had all day. Birding has many of the same hazards, as does dragonfly spotting. …
Glad to meet a kindred spirit.
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I am a seedsperson and a lego fan. (The garden in Winterhaven Fl is great). I nearly died laughing as I have been trying to explain away my distracted driving as safe as I look for palm, oaks, ornamental grasses and other neat plants. Love the plant hording I just added a Baobab to replace my giant Sequoia that died from too much heat.
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Bombacaeae!…….. Topical Dendrology at U of Idaho in 1983……… I just can’t help myself
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Yes, yes, yes. Nearly all the above except never had (or came near having) a wreck because of botanizing. Yes, it did lead us to buy a piece of land (in bad shape) and that led to not only restoring native vegetation, but (in my case) getting into entomology (because look at all those bugs in the cactus flowers! What ARE they? And is that a moth or a butterfly? Etc.) And lichens…good heavens what I thought was bark is actually a patchwork of lichens covering every square centimeter of this hackberry trunk: pink, sage green, different shades of gray, and that’s not counting the ones with the curly and branchy bits…)
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It is truly written. Thankfully, we have these plants around to keep us going. Woe is the day they pull the plug on us animals.
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I am a zoologist, I should write on the hidden dangers of zoology.
Brilliantly funny and utterly accurate article. Even though I did my masters in zoology, I actually wanted to study immunology, pathology, mycology, psychology and botany. I sometimes self-study the aforementioned subjects. Do write more articles about botany. I would love to learn more about the kingdom plantae. 🙂
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Glad you enjoyed it! I am actually an entomologist with a side interest in botany. There will be more posts on both entomology, botany, and plant-insect interactions.
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Entomology is an awesome subject. During my Bachelors, our Entomology professor was spectacular! She was kind and I just loved her. We did study the plant-insect interactions during one semester. It was an awesome experience because the experiments were marvelous. Then tying everything with insects and environment (ecology/ecosysytem) was heartwarming.
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An acquired driving skill is fixing the peripheral vision of the left eye on the center line while scanning along the right side of the roadway. Best done on low speed lightly traveled routes.
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That explains everything! Is there a support group? We had to move to 4 acres so I had room for bromeliads, stapeliads, roses, native gardens, shadehouses, vege gardens, fruit trees, animals and 2 acres of bush. The bush is a constant source of learning more about our native plants, fungi, birds and marsupials and yes there are also carnivorous plants. I called my playground “Botanic Obsession”. Thankyou for this arricle and happy gardening!
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I’m a botanist myself and I can relate to every point that you’ve mentioned.😂 It’s kinda weird to people who don’t actually know what goes through in a botanist’s mind but when you really become intimate with plants, you’ll know for sure what it’s like to be a botanist😊😊
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I have no garden so there’s one evil that I can avoid !
Another one: Having to correct people that all the nice “native” wildflowers and trees like “California” pepper and black mustard are terrible invasives and should be burned.
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It’s not “hoarding” it’s “collecting”
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Yes! Number one resonated with me! I just learned to identify dogwoods (and even blogged about it) 😂😂😂 my drives and interaction with nature are now a lot more intense !! Can’t wait to read more!
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Same for rocks! Beware!! I was hiking from north to south rim of the Grand Canyon and at the bottom I found some particularly fabulous rocks I loaded into my backpack. My hiking companions were duly impressed though incredulous that I was going to haul them the whole way out. They are on my coffee table. Love em! Good news for botanists though…you can always throw some rocks in your yard!!:)
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It’s all true… I know people who have had car wrecks while rubbernecking over plants. I once made a vow that I wouldn’t collect any more plants until I had put all the potted ones in my yard into the ground. It took me two years to get them all in, at which point I just started rapidly collecting all over again.
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Fantastic item. My wife now knows she’s not alone as a botany victim. She says she’s seen more of America backing up than most have going in the right direction. I’m also a trained social worker, so I understand this personality disorder at yet another level. And we all know personality orders don’t change much with treatment!
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Fabulous!!…. I laughed out loud, this is me, and I have seen people roll their eyes when I blurt out a Latin name. I can’t help it. I am glad I’m not alone.
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I’ve taken gardening to the next level with learning about botany – and reading about famous botanists is really interesting as well. Love the pictures, too cute!
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