Botany In A Day

I spent the past two days at the Pond working my way through my first herbal course goal of the year; Thomas J. Elpel’s “Botany In A Day”, a one day tutorial which introduces 8 of the world’s most common plant families and teaches you how to begin to recognize thousands of plants by the family they belong to rather than trying to remember them all individually. Thomas Expel is more of a survivalist than exclusively an herbalist and his focus was quite a bit on edible plants, but still it was a very good informative book on plant biology. I took 2 days for it because I take lots of notes.

You don’t of course finish the book, just the tutorial part, but once you get the idea of thinking in terms of plant families it becomes easier to begin to categorize the plant life you find out there.

This course would have better done in warm weather so you could actually go out and view plants, but as a somewhat experienced forager I didn’t feel that was a big detriment for the moment. I am looking forward to getting out there in the spring and having better tools at my disposal for properly identifying and understanding the properties of what I’m gathering.

What surprised me the most was the categories of plants that are related that I would never have guessed. Like apples are actually part of the Rose family.

Here’s the most interesting tidbit I came away with. Methyl salicylate (basically what aspirin is) is as many will know also one of the active components in willow bark tea, which is a great natural pain remedy. It is also found, in actually a more reliable form, in Spiraea! Spiraea, or Spirea as the common plant goes by, is a flowering shrub and is found in many of the gardens of people I know. I plan to try to nab some and tincture it this next season, and maybe look into adding it to out gardens.

All in all a good accomplishment to have completed, and it’s only January 6! I hope many more to come.