Title and Contents. Books. Learning to Identify Plants by Families. An article by Thomas J. Elpel, author of Botany in a Day. Are you still thumbing through hundreds of pictures to identify wildflowers?
That's the way I started learning plants, but now there is a much easier way! Plants that are related to each other have similar characteristics for identification. Botanists have simply looked for patterns in plants and created groups called "families" according to those patterns. In the northern latitudes where there are hard freezes during winter, there are only about 100 broad patterns representing tens of thousands of plant species.