Raised bog with different mosses, Ericaceae, rare orchids and things like https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/118803-Pedicularis-palustris. Not a hard phantasy to make it true, but need a car for that.(
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Imagine the area now dedicated to garages, parking, roads. If we had good public transport. People could have (much more) gardens at home. Nature (not car) parks at the office, mall, school.
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Houses are still 1-2 storey high in the suburbs of many countries. They have garages and own cars. I live in a city with 12 - 40 storey high public housing and condos. It is never enough for city planners. If they can squeeze more money out from the people, they may do it. Maybe we are still lucky there are public parks to do some nature observations.
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My goal is to observe all the plant species in Vermont. For example, June (2022) was a good month…I observed more than two dozen new species, most of them native plants. I still have a long way to go, however.
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I have heard of a plant family called Burmanniaceae, and the pictures look so unusual compared with other plants, I would love to come across these.
Adders-tongue fern and moonwort, because they look so different from other ferns.
Longer-term: to check off every species in my Golden Guide to Trees of North America. I have gotten most of the pines, about half of the spruces… I have a preference for trees; I will often add the annotation “Tree” when doing IDs.
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I don’t know that I’d travel just for the plants, but there are a few exotic locales I’d like to visit that have some interesting ones. I’d love to see the dragon’s blood trees and the cucumber trees on Socotra, Baobabs and alluaudias on Madagascar (plus a whole host of other Madagascar oddities), rafflessias in SE Asia, and wild Tibetan cherry. I’d love to spend a year in Japan and see the sakura bloom in the Spring, the cedars along the Tokaido highway in the Summer, and Japanese maple in Kyoto (or maybe Hokkaido) in the Autumn. Closer to home, I like mountain wildflowers the best: Mountain bog gentiana, camas flowers, western roseroot (still haven’t seen one of those in person). Pika fill up their larders with mountain flowers and grasses. I’d love to sit and watch them gathering flowers all day long.
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Do you help out with IDing Unknowns there? (Difficult for me to get beyond dicot, which doesn’t help, much)
I wouldn’t be much help, I’m afraid. I can recognize the more iconic plants and animals from nature docs that I’ve seen, but there’s just so many. As much as I enjoy iNaturalist, I’m still just a hobbyist, too. I’ve got no formal education in botany or biology, so the only way I learn species is by seeing them over and over, which means I’m not very useful outside of my regular traveling range.
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I’d like to discover a rare plant right beside my driveway after years of passing it by, and I did. I was working on the driveway one day when a kingsnake came slinking by. I followed it a few steps into a wood line to watch, and then my eyes refocused on an unfamiliar shrub in the way. It turned out to be Castanea alabamensis. Good fun. Thank you kingsnake.
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Loved that story! It reminds me of the famous Robbie Burns line about the fork in the road choice. Maybe sometimes…
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one WELL-traveled by,
And today at least, that has made all the difference.”
Oh, and welcome to the community!
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Good choice…I love that genus.
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I want to see many different plants! I would really like to see different Geranium species, would like to see and pet the soft mullein(Verbascum) leaves, would like to observe parasitic plants such as Orobanche or Phelipanche (I already saw a lot of them parasitic on some species of wormwood/Artemisia that I haven’t identified yet, but I think it would be cool to see more of them and different species), Lathraea, etc… as for the more exotic ones Hydnora, Rafflesia, Rhizanthes seem cool even if some of them are stinky… haha.
I also like observing new ferns, and whenever I manage to find many fern gametophytes on the roots of an upturned tree I feel very lucky regardless of what species it is.
I would like to find Trillium and other relatives of the “raven’s eye” (this is how Paris quadrifolia is called in Russian).
If I could travel to North America I would like to see the giant sequoias! And if I was travelling around tropical Asia, I would definitely want to get a look at the parrot flower Impatiens psittacina.
I would love to see the “glowing” moss Schistostega pennata, and the strange lycopods which look like mini spruces or Christmas trees for example Palhinhaea cernua (I first saw it on wikipedia and would love to find one in real life). Of course I would also love to see the giant horsetails, since horsetails are one of my favorite plants. Equisetum myriochaetum grows up to 7 m and can be found in Central and South America.
Another goal I have is to find the elusive liverwort Haplomitrium hookeri in the field, and I would also love to see some hornworts like Anthoceros agrestis or Notothylas orbicularis. And many other ones…
This is a long list that I can continue for a long time… Basically, finding new plants makes me happy, even rather common ones :)
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But you could find wild orchids. I have seen them in Switzerland, not so far from you. They wait for you …
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Perhaps we all need to stop saying, “never seen” and go with, “never observed”.
It wasn’t until I started using iNat a month and a half ago that I actually realised that a lot of the less common wildflowers that I had come across before without much thought, were indeed wild orchids.
And just the other day, I got a message from an orchid researcher in Italy asking me for copy permission of the first (and only, so far) orchid in my modest and new observation list!
So hang in there–if a pretty clueless noob like myself could find one…
Good luck!
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I think if you have noticee them before, you remember it, they’re modest usually, but still exotic enough, on the field they can be hard to spot, but in forests they stand out.
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Thank you, it’s very inspiring
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I did find my first Western Roseroot (Rhodiola integrifolia) on my last hike. It had only just started to bloom so it wasn’t quite as impressive as the other pictures I’ve seen, but I was still happy to find it.
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For me, it’s any native species. My area is FULL of invasive plants to the point where finding a native is the exception. Of my current native plant observations, here a some of my favourites:
Common Selfheal
Common Milkweed
Large White Trillium
Yellow Trout Lily
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I’d like to find a Trillium …
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