Roadmap to Nature
Welcome to the Roadmap to Nature, where you can find a range of HerbSpeak’s topics and resources at a glance. Here, the idea is to make it easy to start exploring, rather than having to determine what to ask first. This content is arranged in a question-and-answer type format to stimulate curiosity, but you’re welcome to jump in where it is most interesting to you.
This page is created with the beginner Naturalist in mind. Absolute beginner. Someone who has a fuzzy-at-best memory of their 5th grade biology lessons, and just wants to start from scratch.
Botany
What are the different parts of a plant called?
There are different types of plants, not just one specific type. There are generalizations we can make, however, and there is a series on HerbSpeak dedicated to this.
Recommended Series:
Referring to the “bodies” or anatomies of plants and how they grow is typically referred to as its morphology. Plants will evolve to have a morphology that is most beneficial to them, depending on their specific environment, habitat, or growing conditions.
This often ends up in a consistent pattern across a population. If a mutation occurs and continues, it can create enough of a difference to call it a new species or subspecies, but not always.
Sometimes, you will find an individual that is just plain weird compared to the others. A little blip, a little genetic mutation. You’ve probably seen roses at the flower shop with different colors. Each color is a petal mutation.
Mutations are a completely normal part of the evolutionary process, and if the mutation was beneficial to the plant or ecosystem in some way, it could show up more consistently in later generations.
Why do leaves change color?
Leaves change color many times throughout the year. Typically, we know leaves to be green, but leaves can be a range of colors from purple, to yellow, to orange – and even a mix of all of those.
This color is created by the type of pigment that is most dominant in the leaf at the time. Green leaves have a green pigment called chlorophyll, which is also responsible for photosynthesis (the process of turning sunlight into energy.)
Leaves are most known to change from green to a range of colors in the autumn, or fall, in temperate regions. A range of habitat factors such as day length and temperature trigger the plants into “packing up” their nutrients for the winter.
Since plants can’t migrate, but the winters are too cold for their leaves, plants take the water and nutrients from the leaves and store it in their trunks or roots. When they’re ready to sprout again, they use that stored energy to grow new leaves.
Leaves that stay on all winter are called evergreens, and these trees have leaves that are built to withstand the harsh winters. That’s why you’ll see leaves still happily green on pine trees, firs, hemlocks, and other types of evergreens even though they’re weighed down with snow for most of the year. Evergreens are waxier and shaped differently, allowing them to better withstand winter temperatures.
Leaves that fall before winter and sprout again during spring or summer are called deciduous. For plants, this word essentially means ‘to shed annually’.
If you notice a few trees in the landscape that still have their leaves throughout winter, but they are brown and dried, those are called marcescent leaves. Beeches and birches are popular for this phenomenon. It is thought that these leaves stay on to deter animals from eating the tender buds. (1) As a bonus, it may add nutrients to the soil when the leaves decompose in the soil during spring, giving new buds a boost.
How do plants reproduce?
Not all plants reproduce the same way, and how is often guided by what equipment the plant has to work with.
Reproduction can happen many different ways. Some plants will reproduce on their own, through “asexual” reproduction. Others will reproduce only with other plants, or with plants only in specific life stages. Some plants are opportunistic and can do a mix based on what is available to them.
At its simplest, as one example: plant pollination requires pollen and an ovary.
This requires a pollinator – while some plants may utilize a passive pollination method such as wind or water, many plants require active pollinators. Plants will often (not always) offer a reward for the pollinator to entice them into doing the job. Nectar or fruits are one such reward that bees, wasps, flies, and mammals enjoy.
In a plant that has an ovary, the pollen from the new plant will activate the ovaries to swell. The flowers fall off, and the ovary becomes a fruit or seed, which then develops on the plant until it is ripened. Many of the fruits we eat, such as apples, peaches, and plums are an excellent example of this.
Some plants don’t have ovaries and instead their seeds are “naked”, and ferns and mosses reproduce through spores similar to how mushrooms do.
Recommended Reading:
While there are online resources available to the self-driven adult learner who has disposable income, there are few comprehensive resources available without that income barrier. What resources do exist are often for teachers and active students, gated behind .edu logins to verify your enrollment in academia. Beyond that, you’re likely to find resources for parents or teachers of children who are going through 5th grade biology lessons for the first time and need help with their homework. That isn’t engaging to the average adult.
The resources for learning that do exist for adults are scattered across the internet and library archives. They don’t tend to be easily accessible if you don’t know what you are looking for, especially if you are limited in your time or energy – which, most adults with a full-time career and/or with children, often are.
HerbSpeak is meant to change that.
Conservation
I want to become a part of conservation. Where do I start?
In America, it is not uncommon for conservation jobs to require a degree or other type of academic knowledge on a related subject; something that is great if you are in a lab or working with genetics, but can be particularly tricky for career-switchers or those without access to those resources. Since this society doesn’t have easy access to vocational schooling or apprenticeships on natural history or similar subjects (1) the gap is usually filled through on-the-job training.
If you’re not looking to get a full-time job in conservation, becoming a part of conservation becomes much easier. You can find a place to volunteer at many different organizations, from local land trusts, to municipal conservation commissions, or larger non-profit organizations. Museums, herbariums, farms, and similar spaces also may have opportunities. If you own land, you can also start on your own property.
It helps to identify the skills or resources you have, and then try to connect with a volunteer organization. Keep an open mind. Foster your innate sense of curiosity, and be willing to learn – and shamelessly ask questions. This path starts with learning.
It’s important to note that while broader conservation skills and ecological knowledge are something you can learn through textbooks, it does take time to get to know a specific region of the world with hands-on application. Nothing can supplement real, practical familiarity.
Recommended Links:
This Roadmap to Nature page aims to do two things: first, allow you to start with questions first. A lot of resources out there introduce their material with answers to a question you probably haven’t thought to ask. As new resources across the internet come to our attention that could be helpful, it will get added to a resource list that is also linked here.
The second thing this page aims to do is provide you with a way to navigate HerbSpeak. It’s one thing to come across each article on its own, but this page hopes to add context to what is available and help you find the topics that you are interested in.
Looking for something to read? Try something from the blog.
Red Oak VS White Oak: A Beginner Botanist’s Guide
You might think that an oak is an oak, and there’s nothing else to it – but as a beginner botanist or curious naturalist, you might start to take a second look at those trees, however, and notice that they are all different. Red and white oaks are not just individual trees, but separate groups that contain different species. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to tell them apart…
The Language of Science: Understanding Binomial Nomenclature
Since the beginning of written history, people have tried to categorize things, organizing the web of life into a wide range of classifications to better understand the world. This was the beginning of taxonomy, or the science of naming things.
Springtime Sighting of a Vulnerable Butterfly, the West Virginia White
One spring morning, eight botanists packed into carpools and drove to a small town on the far edge of western Massachusetts to find a small white butterfly, Pieris virginensis, and its host plant, Cardamine concatenata and C. diphylla.
Pinanga subterranea: The Palm That Flowered Underground
This morning, a news story broke that a rare palm was found to flower and fruit...
What Is Ecological Planting?
Ecological planting is a transformative approach to land restoration that everyone can participate in. The focus of this growing movement is to utilize the resilience and genetic diversity of native flora to restore ecosystem relationships, creating healthier habitats for resilience in the face of change. But, what exactly does that mean?