It’s so nice to move into a house whose previous owners were gardeners. Plants grow and bloom, creating a nice tableau in the yard, without much prodding from their new owners.
Problems appear, though, if those prior owners didn’t leave behind name tags on the plants. Something beautiful bursts into bloom, and all the new owner can say is, “Oh, that orange flower is so pretty.”
But people who don’t know the names of the plants in their yards give up more than botanical bragging rights. They also reduce the chance that if a bug or disease starts to spoil a plant, they’ll be able to find the right control. And when they find that a certain plant seems to do especially well in the particulars of their yard, they go into a nursery not knowing what it is they want to plant more of.
Resources for helping find the identity of unfamiliar plants are plentiful. The Chicago area is well served by several horticultural institutions and nurseries whose staff members can quickly identify all manner of garden plants. And for the person who wants to try a little botanical sleuthing, many books are organized to facilitate the search.
The easiest way to identify a plant in your yard is to glance up and down the block and see if you spot the same thing in someone else’s yard. Chances are that person knows what it is.
A similar tactic is to wander among the labeled plants at horticultural institutions like the Morton Arboretum, the Chicago Botanic Garden and Cantigny, or at a nursery with a wide selection and good signage, in the hope that the same plant will be visible there.
Your best bet is to go when the plant is in bloom, because you’ll be far more likely to spot it that way than by looking for similar greenery.
If the easy ways don’t work out, decide whether you want to try to identify the plant yourself or lean on the professionals’ expertise.
One key thing to determine before attempting to identify a plant is into which broad category it fits. Is it an annual, which is a flowering plant, usually small, that will last only one warm season? Or is it a perennial, which also flowers, but usually not as long, and returns each spring.
A shrub, which may or may not have an obvious flower, is a “woody” plant, which means its stems are hard and, usually, brown (though often not at the tips). Trees are woody plants, too.
If the plant is an annual, the best way to identify it is to stroll the aisles of a nursery until you find its match. For the longer-lived plants, though, some very useful books are in print, many of them available in libraries if not in bookstores.
What you might initially reach for may be of little help. Paging through an alphabetical encyclopedia of plants–no matter how detailed the entries or how nice the pictures–is frustrating and may turn up no answers. Instead, get a book that groups plants by their flowers’ color. Then, with your mystery guest’s bloom in hand, you can easily compare it to all that flowers in the same color.
A few books that arrange perennials by color: Taylor’s Guide to Perennials (1987, Houghton Mifflin Co.); the Peterson First Guides volume on wildflowers (1986, Houghton Mifflin Co.) or the more comprehensive Peterson Field Guide, also on wildflowers (1986, Houghton Mifflin Co.); and the Audubon Society Nature Guides (various years, Alfred A Knopf), which are categorized by type of landscape–such as grassland and woodland.
The Taylor’s book is the first to try, because it covers some 400 perennials commonly used in gardens. The other books aren’t expressly about garden flowers, but because so many gardens now include native plants and wildflowers, they are likely to hold answers not found in the first book.
For shrubs and trees, pick up The Shrub Identification Book and the Tree Identification Book, both by George W.D. Symonds (William Morrow, Publisher). The tree volume is 40 years old and the shrub book is 35, but both are still the standards. Photos are in black and white, but because woody plants are more likely to be recognized by their leaf shape and pattern than by their flower, that’s not a hindrance. However, sometimes finding the right tree or shrub entry is a matter of simply looking at each page until the match appears.
That may be reason enough to turn tree and shrub identification over to the professionals. Even with perennials, you might wind up too boggled by the possibilities to settle on one answer yourself. So go the professional route.
There’s no hurry to identify plants, really, so Lee Randhava, who as plant information specialist at the Chicago Botanic Garden gets asked to identify plants every day, suggests observing the plant for a full year before trying to name it.
“You learn things like what time of year it blooms, whether it gets berries or fruit, if it loses its leaves for winter, whether its color changes in the fall,” she says. “These are all clues we use when identifying it.”
A year of observation also gives you time to decide whether the plant is even something you like having in your garden, Randhava notes.
To get a woody plant or a perennial identified by staffers at the plant clinics of the arboretum and botanic garden, you’ll need to provide a complete cutting. It should include the flower or berries and a section of stem with leaves attached. The stem should be at least 6 to 8 inches long, enough to let the detective see how the leaves are arranged (whether they are paired on opposite sides of the stalk, for example, or staggered, with a leaf first on one side and then the other).
If you want to see how horticulturists go about determining the identity of a plant, take your sample to either institution in person. But for people short on time, both the arboretum and the botanic garden accept plant queries by mail. Send them to either: Plant Clinic, Morton Arboretum, 4100 Route 53, Lisle, IL 60532; or Plant Information Service, Chicago Botanic Garden, 1000 Lake Cook Road, Glencoe, IL 60022.
Don’t worry about keeping the sample fresh and green. Doris Taylor, director of the arboretum’s plant information service, says that although people are sometimes inclined to mail plants wrapped in moist paper towels, it’s actually better (for the plant detective and for the mail carrier) to send the dry sample flattened between sheets of thin cardboard.
The best way to get plants identified doesn’t yet exist, officially. That would be a service where a professional horticulturist walks through your garden and names everything in it for you–for a fee. But you can get this kind of help informally, says Barbara Rosborough, president of a Highland Park landscape firm and president-elect of the Illinois Landscape Contractors Association.
Rosborough suggests calling a local landscape firm and asking if anybody on staff would be available to name some of the plants in a yard. At most firms, if the call comes anytime other than during the spring/early summer planting frenzy, there ought to be somebody who would be willing to help for an hourly fee, she says.
