Botanizing: The best hobby you’ve never heard of

The quickest way to describe botanizing is that it is like bird-watching, but for plants. To botanize, you go out into natural areas and look for plants growing in the wild, maybe hoping to see new species or particularly impressive populations of familiar species. Professional botanists do this to monitor the health of species, track the impacts of threats to their habitats, and better understand their natural ranges and ecology. Amateur botanists, like me, do it for fun.

I think I first heard botanize used as a verb when I was in graduate school. I was floating down a river in a canoe with a bunch of other grad students studying plant science (none of us botanists) and one of them pointed to a bank and said, “I’ve botanized up there – found some nice orchids.” I nodded intelligently as I puzzled out this unfamiliar verb form of the word botany, pretending I knew what he meant.

As it turns out, I’ve been botanizing for much longer than I had a name for it. If you’ve been reading these posts, you’ve gathered that I spent a significant chunk of my childhood running around the woods – partly because the woods were beautiful and fascinating and right outside the backdoor, and partly, I suppose, because I grew up in a family of seven crammed into a three-bedroom house, so out in the woods was the only place to get a little space to myself.

Trillium grandiflorum

As I hiked around the woods, I quickly learned where to find the best wildflowers. Gorgeous plants like Trillium grandiflorum and Mertensia virginica grew in carpets everywhere, but because they were so common, I quickly found them dull and went searching for rarer, most exciting finds. Deep red Trillium erectum was far less common, so finding a nice stand of it was always a thrill. Most treasured of all were plants like Hepatica americana and Phlox divaricata which I knew from just one location in the park each.

Rubus odoratus

As I explored more and more, I grew familiar with how to “read” the landscape, and scope out the right habitats for particular plants. Fragrant purple flowering raspberries (Rubus odoratus) I’d find mostly in the bright semi-shade near the edges of the creek, in habitat periodically ripped apart by spring floods.

Mitchella repens

Christmas ferns (Polystichum acrostichoides) and partridge berry (Mitchella repens) grew in the deep dark shade under hemlocks. Trilliums and other showy spring wildflowers need bright shade, often exploding into bloom in openings made in the canopy when a mature tree falls, and then fading away as the tree canopy fills in again. Hepaticas will be quickly killed by a thick layer of fall leaves, so you’ll usually find them growing on slopes where leaves can’t accumulate, or in flood plains where leaves get washed away with the rising waters of spring snowmelt.

However, though it is possible to learn how to spot suitable habitat for different species, plants are endlessly unpredictable. I learned this once while visiting another park in the area. The habitat was similar to what I was familiar with at home: A deep ravine, carved by glaciers on their way to what would become Lake Erie, with a stream running at the bottom of it. I expected to find all the same, familiar species. Instead, I stumbled on a carpet of hundreds if not thousands of tiny, four-petaled flowers exactly the shade of a perfect summer blue sky. Bluets (Houstonia caerulea). Not a rare species, by any measure, but somehow one I had never seen before. Later, at a boy scout campground, I stumbled on a population of painted trillium (Trillium undulatum). I didn’t realize it at the time, but it is perhaps the only population of the species in Ohio, a far-flung disjunct from their usual habitat in the Appalachian mountains and New England.

Houstonia caerulea

The painted trilliums and bluets were both growing in habitat that looked exactly like those I was familiar with at home – why they grew in one spot and not the other, I do not know. Perhaps a better botanist than me would have the answer to that, but for every answer you get about botany, there are another dozen unanswered questions to explore. Plants move and evolve on slow, geological time scales, and in response to factors that may always be beyond the capacity of humans to fully comprehend.

But some of the factors that determine which plants you’ll find where are easy to understand. I grew up in Northeastern Ohio on shale bedrock topped with extremely acidic, clay soils. But running through Ohio is a band of limestone bedrock, which produces very alkaline soils. If you drive south from where I grew up towards Columbus where I went to college, you cross a line where everything changes. The familiar great white trilliums of my youth are largely replaced by the beautifully mottled leaves of sessile trilliums. When you know what to look for, the change is sudden and dramatic, easily spotted out the windows of a car speeding down the highway in the spring, as white flowers under the trees change to more subtle reddish blooms.

Tetraneuris herbacea

These sudden changes of plants as you move to a different soil type, elevation, or climate, are what makes traveling to botanize so much fun. I’m always botanizing when I hike and travel, and in the last few years, I’ve been making special botanizing trips each year, planning to visit special areas to see particular species in bloom. I’ve made several pilgrimages to see the lakeside daisies (Tetraneuris herbacea) on the shores of Lake Erie – a wildflower I’d grown in my garden long before I saw it in the wild. It is only known from a handful of locations, but where it thrives, like in the Lakeside Daisy State Nature Preserve, it grows with abandon, carpeting the ground with little yellow daisies.

Trillium nivale

The Cincinnati area has been a target of botanizing trips for me lately, something about its topography and limestone bedrock makes it a hot spot for botanical diversity. One year, I went in early March to see perhaps my favorite trillium in bloom – the snow trillium (Trillium nivale), which is like a perfectly miniaturized – and much much earlier blooming – version of the familiar great white trillium. The next, I headed down in late April, to see one of our wildly underappreciated native woodland wildflowers, the ephemeral Delphinium tricorne. This year, I’m scheming to see the wonderful Iris cristata in the wild in April, and, perhaps, another trip to celebrate Rubus odoratus in midsummer.

Delphinium tricorne

More Delphinium tricorne

Even MORE Delphinium tricorne

I’m also hoping to learn to botanize in prairies. Where I live now in Northern Indiana the native landscape is eastern woodland, but drive just a bit west into Illinois and there are prairies. Prairies full of plants I’m not very familiar with in a landscape I don’t know how to read. At the beginning of this essay, I quickly rattled off the preferred habitats of many of my favorite woodland wildflowers. But in a prairie, I’m completely lost. What interactions of soil, topography, and the history of the location make for great wildflowers? I don’t know! But I’m excited to spend time hiking through prairies within driving range and start learning.

How to get started with botanizing

If you’ve never botanized before and want to get started, I’d suggest two different approaches.

Lilium michiganense

One is to spend time regularly in natural areas near you. Visit local parks and hike through them at different times of the year, and you’ll start discovering a wonder of beautiful plants. There is something incredibly rewarding about getting to know a particular community of plants well. In no time, you’ll have your favorite populations of flowers and you’ll know when to come to catch them at peak bloom each year.

Lithospermum carolinense

For the past few years, I’ve been doing this at the Indiana Dunes State and National Parks near me. I make a point of getting out there to see my long-time favorites like Lilium michiganense and hairy puccoon (Lithospermum carolinense, but I always use that delightful common name), and every year I find new treasures. Last year it was a population of the absurdly beautiful fringed gentian (Gentianopsis crinita) tucked away in a low wet spot between the dunes.

Gentianopsis crinita

The other approach is to travel to exciting populations of plants in other locations. The best tool I know to find these is the website inaturalist.org. Any time you find a cool plant (or insect or bird or any other living thing, actually) you can take a photo of it and post it with the location to the inaturalist site. Scientists – professional botanists – use the information on the site all the time in their own research. In fact, recently an entirely new genus of plants was identified and named thanks to a photo someone posted to inaturalist (https://www.npr.org/2025/02/26/nx-s1-5308248/wooly-devil-new-species-genus-big-bend). Using the site is a great way to record your personal botanizing experiences, and it is also a fantastic way to find cool populations to visit. Simple search for the name of the plant you are interested in and a map will pop up showing where everyone else using the site has recorded finding it. Even better, because people record the date when they photographed the plants, you can use the site to figure out the best time of year to visit to catch plants at their best. I often build my botanizing trips around a specific species and come up with a list of half-a-dozen parks to visit from the inaturalist site, and good habitat for one wildflower is usually good habitat for many other species as well, so I’ve stumbled on many incredible unplanned botanical experiences along the way. Be aware, however, that for some rare and endangered species, there is an option to hide the exact location where they were photographed to keep plant poachers away.

Sanguinaria canadensis

So, as we move into spring, and countless plants come into bloom, I hope you’ll give botanizing a try. You might just get hooked.