(Part 2) Top products from r/botany

Fruit by Stuppy and Kesseler is packed full of gorgeous scanning electron micrographs (and other pictures too) and a lot of very detailed but very readable information. I can not reccomend it highly enough. Seeds and Pollen are also very good. I have not read it (just found it now, going straight on my wishlist) but The Bizzare and Incredible World of Plants, also by Stuppy is almost certainly excellent.

It's a bit technical and dry, but Plant Form, by Adrian Bell is one of my favorite reference books of all time. The information is fascinating, and the diagrams are gorgeous. There's a free online copy available (legal, I think) if you would like to have a look, but I would highly recomend a physical copy, and it's pretty cheap as far as reference books go. Flip through the section on Tree Architecture starting at page 296 for a sample of how cool it is. Read and understand that section and you will be amazed at the things you will start noticing about plants around you.

For plant ID, I can not reccomend Botany in a Day highly enough for a quite comprehensive tutorial in how to recognize plant groups (which makes it orders of magnitude easier to come up with a more specific ID). It's a classic, and is a required text for just about every field botany class.

Getting a good guide to your local plants that is based on dichotomous keys and diagrams rather than photos and learning how to use it is an absolute must if you want to move past the basics for IDing plants in your area. Without knowing your location, it's impossible to give good recomendations, but the Jepson Manual is a good example of what you should be looking for, and by far the best guide to California plants. Unfortunately these sorts of books are usually fairly pricey, and can be pretty impenetrable without practice (helps a lot if you already have a general idea of what it is), so you might hold off on getting one until a much later date. You can get older editions for cheaper, but at least in the case of Jepson's, most of the changes involve more diagrams and easier to use keys, so it might not be worth it.

There are loads of others that are slipping my mind at the moment, I will add them later if I remember.

Hey thank you for the resources! plants.jstor.org looks to be closer to what I'm looking for, specifically the ability to search by region. Kew looks great as well, but when I search for a broad term like desert, I only get 25 results. I'd love to find something more in depth in the sense of "Plants of the Savanna" or something.

Here's an example of the kind of book I've been looking at, but I could do with less in depth info and variation, and more "international" or "regional" if that makes sense. Best is to have a small image like this book with the real world plant, the scientific name, and location. I'm a total layman when it comes to horticulture. I work as a 3D environment artist, so I'm just trying to collect useful resources to reference when approaching foliage creation :)

https://www.amazon.com/American-Horticultural-Society-Encyclopedia-Practical/dp/0789489937

There are a lot of definitions of invasive, and the idea is not to get too caught up in semantics. Just as there are a lot of different views of what determines a species. The context is very important here. I interpret this subthread to mean that Seranoa repens is invasive to certain ecosystems, or that urban expansion has created conditions that encourage growth of the plant that wouldn't otherwise exist. Invasion Biology - Mark A Davis is a great book to read if you're interested.

in the intermediate range (not as advanced as a Flora w/ keys, but better than most "pretty-picture" field guides)

http://www.kswildflower.org/ and book http://www.kansaspress.ku.edu/hadwil.html
Falcon Guide: Tallgrass Prairie Wildflowers http://www.amazon.com/Tallgrass-Prairie-Wildflowers-Midwest-Wildflower/dp/0762737441

have fun -- it's a neat place to visit

Like others have said, learning what characteristics plant families have makes plant I.D. so much easier. If this is something you really want to learn, I'd recommend a book like Wendy B. Zomlefer's Guide to Flowering Plants or Practical Plant Identification by James Cullen. Both of those should give you a rundown on common plant family characteristics and help you narrow it down at least to a family, if not a genus. Being able to accurately I.D. plants quickly is mostly practise, though; the more you do it, the easier it gets.

Though, because you don't think it's a native plant, once you have a rough idea of what it is, you can look at ornamental plants that will grow in your zone.

The Flora of the Pacific Northwest is the book you want. It has full keys. Picture guides specifically related to the northwest (like this and this) can be used to supplement this, but FPN is the best authority for most of that region.

"Wildflowers of North America" and Newcomb's Guide and things like that are not going to help you at all. They mostly cover Eastern species and there is rather little botanical overlap between there and the Pacific Northwest.

You could definitely re-glue it or remove it if you'd like. It would be easier to water that way.

You could mist it using something like this, but even if you do that, it will still want a full watering some times. A full dunk. The misting is to provide supplemental humidity to recreate it's natural growing conditions

Sorry, and I forgot to mention - air plants dont like tap water. Spring water or rain water.

As others have said, it depends on your location. I'm in Illinois and I use Vascular Flora of Illinois by Mohlenbrock Easily the best Key i've come across

Depends what you're looking for. The stores are chock full of them.

Perhaps I can suggest an unusual one: the fragrant garden, by LB Wilder. (http://www.amazon.fr/Fragrant-Garden-Scented-Flowers-Leaves/dp/0486230716)

Mainly about smelly things - and the pleasure they bring. A good book to read when the garden is still, in winter.

Orchid grower here.

Note that the plant has to hit a certain size before it starts to flower; the flowers then have to be hand-pollinated before noon. I think the latest article on it was by Fouché and Coumans (as below).

The fruits must then be harvested, "killed" (usually with heat, but also can be done with alcohol) to stop ripening, and then dried.

The amount of work that goes into it is why vanilla is second only to saffron in terms of expense.

Make Mine Vanilla is probably the single best text on the subject of vanilla, its harvest, and post-harvest treatment.

Fouché, J. G., and Coumans, M. 1992. Vanilla. American Orchid Society Bulletin 61: 1118-1122.

Best ref imo http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0415308291

The Complete Book of Herbs introduced me to the medical herb garden. It's wonderful to see it executed so thoroughly. Great job, New York.

You could trying buying a dichotomous key, finding an identified plant, and see if you can key it out correctly :)

My favorite is this one but you may want to find one that's more geographically relevant.

This is a good book to learn about California plant communities.
https://smile.amazon.com/Introduction-California-Plant-Life-Revised/dp/0520237048/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1538069607&sr=8-1&keywords=california+plant+life&dpID=51SQuUbaLjL&preST=_SY291_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch

There are a lot of books on the native American uses of plants. They varied widely by tribe but here is one

https://smile.amazon.com/California-Plants-Natural-History-Guides/dp/0520000722/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1538069637&sr=8-1&keywords=plants+of+the+california+indians&dpID=41%252BwRvGOqOL&preST=_SY291_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch


The thing about California is it has a hugely diverse flora so it's a huge subject and the plants indigenous people used varied widely by location. The guide to California flora is about 4 inches thick contrast that with a guide to the Nebraska flora being a very thin volume.

If you want hardcore stuff, here is what I use:

• Flora of the Pacific Northwest - The full 5 volume set for all the illustrations
  
  
• Flora of North America around 30 volumes
  
  
• Biology of Plants by Peter (mother fucking) Raven
  
  
• Plant Systematics by Simpson
  
  
• Plant Identification Terminology
  
  

Anatomy of Seed Plants

Check out Newcomb's Wildflower Guide by Lawrence Newcomb - its a classic and based on flowers.

This book has been on my list for awhile.