A five-day course in plant structure, relationships, geography, and identification, focusing on the woodland plants of Plainfield and the Granite Hills, with emphasis on woody plants, sedges, herbs, and some of the larger and nicer mosses.

The course will be taught as a series of exercises. We will typically start the day by looking at plants in the classroom, then go outside and see them in the field, and then return to study them in the classroom again. There will also be short morning lectures, and, to balance them, afternoon discussions and presentations by students.

Our first goal will be to learn about the common local plants—how they are made, where they live, what they do, whom they are related to, how they are identified—by direct observation. Our second goal will be, by discussions and readings, to get a sense of the plant world as a whole—where it came from, what it does, how it has transformed the planet.

Our method will be to take a few plants at a time and learn as much as we can about them. Our tools will be lenses, microscopes, notebooks, and drawing boards. The exercises will focus on observing, describing, comparing and identifying. The daily problems will start simple, with simple places and easy plants near Goddard, and progress to richer and harder ones in the Granite Hills. There are some lovely places nearby, and we will make sure we visit them. One the last day we will do something fun, perhaps a scavenger hunt or a mini survey, as a graduation exercise.

Offered jointly by the North Branch Nature Center’s Biodiversity University and the Northern Forest Atlas Project.