Botany Educator Offers Practical Guide for Self-taught Learners

The advice emphasizes using the internet as a 24-hour library and looking up unfamiliar words or concepts. Key foundational knowledge includes understanding why Latin names are used in taxonomy, noting that common names like "cedar" can refer to multiple unrelated plants, while scientific names such as Cedrus are specific. The guide also explains the rules of scientific nomenclature, such as capitalizing the genus and italicizing names.

Taxonomy groups organisms by evolutionary relationships, allowing identification of unknown plants by recognizing family or genus traits. The recommended textbook is Michael Simpson's Plant Systematics, now in its third edition, which covers plant evolution and identification through synapomorphies. The author also mentions free resources like libgen.is and sci-hub.se for accessing textbooks, suggesting a cheap Android tablet for reading PDFs.