Flowers & Fruit
Today we hiked 7.5 miles up a mountain and back to collect plant specimens. There were all kinds of interesting plants and trees, but the only specimens we were allowed to gather had fruit or flowers on them.
Why? We learned that flowers & fruit help a botanist identify plants. Specimens have to be in flower or fruit form in order to be accepted into an herbarium.
I never thought about this before, but it makes sense. Try picking four leaves from four different plants. Put them away. Look at them the next day. Could you tell what plants the leaves came from? Probably not. So many plants have similar leaves.
Now look at the flowers or fruit. As soon as you see either one, you know what plant it came from or else you can go find a picture of it and identify what plant it came from.
Try it at home or on the schoolyard and see!
Here's today's slideshow:
Labels: botanist, flowers, fruit, herbarium, identification, plants
posted by Ms. B @ 7:36 PM
6 Comments:
Hi Ms.Bhatt,were the colors keep reapeating or the different every time you see a specimines?
Hi Ms.Bhatt what does the tree have or what kind of tree was that because it is was red with flowers.
Hi Ms.Bhott I hope you are having fun.
Hi Ms.Bhatt,did the colors of the specmines reapeat or it stayed like the same colors.
Did you really have to go throw all of those mountains. Cause that is alot of work. So you really experiment all of those plants.When you come back could you tell us what was there. How did it felt to be next to a snake. Cause I will be scared if that happen.
The colors usually were the same, but sometimes, the higher up the mountain we went, the smaller the specimen was.
The tree with the red bark is called a manzanita or a ribbonwood tree.
Bryan, we really did go up that mountain. It was a lot of fun. The snake wasn't scary at all because it was so small, and I knew it wasn't dangerous. The scorpions are little scary, though.
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