Advanced Field Botany Training

I have been stomata deep for the past two weeks in McCall for what feels like botany summer camp and I am nothing short of wilted. Instead of attending the Chicago Training I took a summer Advanced Field Botany intensive through the University of Idaho. It has exceeded my expectations in many regards but has left me feeling like I know even less about plants, the world of angiosperms continues to expand for me and makes me feel like I will be studying this for the rest of my life. Both confirming and overwhelming.

The class schedule is as follows, one day in the field collecting voucher specimens and one day in lecture in the lab keying out what we collected the day prior. Below is a picture of the class organizing our collections in the field.

After we organize it in the field we clean the specimens up and put them in a large press and then in a plant dryer. Tower of Pisa am I right??

A big part of the class has been orienting myself again to phylogeny, especially since the professors do a lot of work on phylogeny, specifically on the Super Asterids. I woke up early to write it out on the board the other day.

One of the instructors wrote out all the angiosperm families on the board according to order and phylogeny.

All in all it has been actually a really expansive experience. It has been nice getting away from the dry deserts of Southern Idaho and being in the lush and abundant forest and mountains and lakes of central/western Idaho. I have keyed out a lot of plants in the last two weeks and feel re-inspired to continue studying by myself and pursue a degree eventually. All in all, even though I am totally wiped from this class, I wish I could take it again and get even deeper into genre specific questions, key even more gramanoids, and try and dip my toes into lycophytes.

Here some cool shots from the class and some of my favorite showy flowers.