@ml@plantscience Not a botanist, just an amateur gardener, but for me I think it has to be herbs. Nothing specific: thyme, rosemary, oregano, etc etc, they all count. I just love the way that plants have evolved to give us such a fantastic range of tastes.
@ml@plantscience
When I started grad school after a few years of being a technician, plants were going molecular and I thought it would be a good change. Landed in a maize lab because it was working on gene regulation and you could transposon-tag genes.
Backyard fruit is the best! My grandparents had a pear tree in their backyard, and one house I lived in as a kid had two cherry trees (one sweet, one sour). Only year I got tired of cherries …
@ml@plantscience Prairie Crocus/Pasqueflower (Pulsatilla patens) - it has always been a treat to be greeted by spring's first flower, sometimes even poking through the snow!
@plantscience It's hard for me to think which was the very first plant to catch my eye, but I can say which is the first plant I remember being enthralled with: A 'Newtown Pippin' apple planted in the backyard of a house we were temporarily staying in for a year. The yard also had a FANTASTIC peach tree that I don't know the ID of and 'Hachiya' persimmons hanging over from a neighbor. It was the first time I'd ever tasted tree-ripened fruit and I was bowled over. #Planticipation#FruitToot
@plantscience Being raised in CA, we had access to pretty good produce, but there was still a difference in taste and quality between what you could get ripe off a tree vs what could be shipped to markets in the 1970s (let alone now). #Planticipation#FruitToot
When I was a child, I loved African Violets. They would grow with a minimum of care, had lovely flowers, and best of all, I could cut off a leaf, put it in water, wait for roots to grow, and then, I would have a whole new plant!
@ml@plantscience in Quebec, I went to a sugarbush where the sugar maple farmer showed me around his family's stand of Acer saccharum. It was magic hearing about his love and care for these trees. This lit the fuse to tree identification, sympatric plants, dichotomous identification, taxonomy, cladistics, ecology, etc.
@ml@plantscience Poking at my grandpa's backyard cactuses in Los Angeles. I would scratch them up as a little kid so the patterns would stay on the leaves. I'd do it on the thorniest ones so no one would suspect a human had done it. Not sure if I fooled anyone.
@cbuddenhagen@ml@plantscience OMG Indian paintbrush! Never saw it before until traveling this year, and I was completely smitten. Made my husband stop the car. Stole a blossom and put it in my water bottle. It kept me company all week.
@ml@plantscience How about the first plant I was obsessed with? Anemone virginiana, Thimbleweed, which I found growing at the edge of a nearby woods. The mystery was why this Piedmont plant was growing on a ridge in the Coastal Plain. TLDR: calcareous soil.
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