The Botanical Language

by Virginia A. Crowl

The Botanical Language is a CD-ROM-based Guide to the terminology professional botanists use to describe plants accurately and concisely so that other botanists can use those descriptions to identify unfamiliar plants. This Guide uses nearly 300 photographs to illustrate over 700 terms.

This site contains a tour so you can see how the CD-ROM works and judge whether it serves your needs.

Synopsis

The Botanical Language: An Interactive Guide to Vascular Plants by Virginia A. Crowl teaches the specialized language botanists use to describe the structure and parts of plants.

The main purpose of this Guide is to make it easier to understand the technical descriptive terminology of vascular plants not only by defining the principal terms used in the identification of plants, but especially by illustrating them with photographs. The Guide includes photographic examples of the different forms of most of the plant parts visible through a ten-power lens and it notes synonyms. The Guide also includes additional terms. At a glance one can see what a “stipule” is or how pointed a “leaf” must be to be considered “awl-shaped”.

The second application of the Guide is as a self-teaching tool for those who want to start from scratch, or from anywhere beyond that, to learn the many parts that make up a plant, the forms those parts can take, and the botanically accurate way to describe them.

A third use for this Guide is as a quick reference dictionary for individuals who already have a fairly good botanical vocabulary. Even professional botanists can use a friendly reminder from time to time. Professional botanists will find the Guide a useful supplement to technical botanical glossaries and plant systematics text books.

The Botanical Language is suitable either as adjunct material for early university botany courses, such as taxonomy, or for the interested layman who wants to expand his knowledge. The availability of this material in electronic format enables creation of illustrations and blow-ups of the photographs with labels on the parts under discussion as well as to quick movement between the glossary, the text, and supporting material.

For instructional purposes the Guide is organized into eight photographic chapters—Flower Structure, Inflorescence, Leaves, Descriptive Terms, Roots and Stems, Fruits and Seeds, Grasses and Sedges, and Nonflowering Plants—through which the student should proceed sequentially. These chapters introduce terms in a sequence designed to educate the student, accompanied by a photograph that illustrates what the term means on a real plant. The accompanying blowup has callouts indicating some terms discussed in the text. There is repetition of the terms in several photographs to help the student remember them. There are nearly 300 photographs.

The glossary defines over 700 terms and each is cross-linked to a photograph. In addition, there are two support chapters: Relationships of Terms, including: Contrasting Terms—words of opposite meaning; Confusing Terms—may appear similar, or have similar but distinct meanings; Merging Terms—indicates the boundaries between related words, and Taxonomic Table of Plants, organized by division and family and presenting common as well as botanical names.

Additionally, the Guide contains a bibliography, taxonomic index, and biography of the author.