Neighborhood Plants Project

APPE Rotation Home

Get to know the plants you live with!

Take several hours to walk around your neighborhood and notice all the plants who live there with you. You might find them anywhere – in lawns, in cracks in the sidewalk, in the bits of dirt around the trees along the road.

Save a map of your neighborhood. Walk all the streets around where you live, and photograph each plant. Make a note on the map of where that plant was growing (if you see it in multiple areas, mark it in each place).

Ideally, you should be photographing “weeds.” Grasses are not commonly employed in herbal medicine, and ornamental plants are also often not medicinal in nature – however, go ahead and photograph the ornamental plants anyway, because at least some of them are medicinal, and sometimes people plant herbs as ornamentals. We will help you make the distinction.

If there is any wild area near your home (whether it is land along a waterway, or just a vacant lot that is overgrown), give special attention to this area. Feel free to expand your area beyond your own neighborhood, and investigate other parts of the city – along the river banks, in the Fens, the Arboretum, the Reservoir, and other green places. Are there certain plants that only grow in certain parts of the city? Which plants do you find growing in every place you look?

Make notes about where the plant is growing, and what that might tell you about the plant. What are the soil conditions here? How much sunlight does this plant get through the course of the day? How does water move through this area?

Spend time noticing how the plant is structured – how many petals are on the flower? Is the stem square or round, smooth or stubbly, etc? Are the leaves symmetrical? Are they smooth or fuzzy? Notice and document as much as you can about each plant.

Create a presentation that incorporates your map, the photos you took, your identification of the plants, and your observations about their growing environments. If you can’t identify the plant, bring your pictures to us and we will help you.

You should identify 8-12 plants for this project. (Yes, even in the winter. Hint: trees are plants.)

The more time that you spend staring at plants, the better your skills of identification will become!

Plant ID Resources

• GoBotany – The single most useful plant identification resource for New England.
• PlantNet – A decent plant identification app: take a photo, upload it to the cloud, and AI will suggest possible matches. Likely to get you at least to a genus, if not the exact species.
• Boston Street Tree Map – Find your neighborhood and use this to ID some of the trees on your street!
• Wildcrafting for Beginners, Howie Brounstein – You should read this before ever harvesting anything (except perhaps a dandelion).
• Poison-Ivy.org – It’s particularly helpful to be able to identify this plant!
• Wildflowers and Weeds – Includes many photos of plants according to the families & patterns methods outlined in Tom Elpel’s book Botany In A Day.
• Botany Everyday – Self-paced classes in plant ID, also based on Botany In A Day.
• Identify That Plant
• The Plant List – “A working list of all known plant species.”
• Arnold Arboretum, Harvard University – Check out their Plant Image Search and Arboretum Explorer interactive map!
• Practical Plants

PS: I am unable to access OneDrive files, so if your file is too large to send by normal email, please set up a Dropbox or Google Drive link that allows viewing, and send it to me that way. Thank you!