For the power of a good illustration

For many of us, good illustrations are of crucial importance in learning to recognize different plant species - I suspect this goes for other parts of the Five Kingdoms as well. Nothing probably beats looking at the real thing together with someone who knows it better than you do, and who is happy to point and tell: within any group of naturalists there will be a lot of this informal apprenticeship learning going on between people.

The actual specimens preserved in a herbarium may be the second best thing for learning plant recognition. At least they represent the Real Thing, and you can navigate descriptive text by them: figuring out what's a bract and what's a sepal - although I'd say you have to be fairly experienced with pressed and preserved materials before you acquire useful skills in relating them to fresh samples. And collections of well identified specimens are not by far as accessible as books, either. So, just like text-only descriptions and keys, they're not "for the faint-hearted". I'm looking for bridges, here - in the end, competence consists in being able to use all these resources for learning: people, things, words and pictures.

When you're an interested novice, on your own with the books (and e-media, these days), you rely a lot on finding matches based upon visual appearance in general and in not too small-scale details. You browse the illustrations before you start reading the descriptions or find reason to go through the steps of a key. With time and experience you will learn to rely more on those text genres - particularly when you understand enough to want to align the identification of your findings with the current scientific definitions. That is probably about the same time that you learn how to actually see those fine details you need a magnifier for.

Without instructive illustrations to organize the details of a description into a whole (which is more than its parts) you'll probably give up, as a novice - I think that you have to have accumulated a fairly extensive knowledge of the field already, to be able to read character descriptions with enough understanding not to be confused by the mixture of details they give. There may be other preferred paths, but at least, visual people, like me, will do a lot of browsing. On the other hand, just browsing without any clue of the systematics, you'll probably also get frustrated and lose interest at some point. The more you learn to make edcuated guesses about which family an unfamiliar plant looks most likely to belong to, the less time it will take you to zoom in on a likely target - and start reading and comparing descriptions. So a smartly organized handbook will nudge you towards the systematics - an organization by habitat may be convenient for absolute beginners, but will pretty soon be too constraining. A "user friendly" handbook will also make it easy to switch your attention back and forth between illustration and description - preferably without having to turn pages.

Page created April 18 2002, modified April 19 2002,
Eva Ekeblad; <>

In these days when we are so surrounded by imagery that advertises anything between heaven and earth, why should we not give a bit of visual promotion to our fellow beings in the Five kingdoms? With good illustrations more people get the chance to learn more about the great variety of nature around us. And a good illustration does not just present us with visual facts, but also evokes our aesthetic admiration and ethical sense of responsibility. There is beauty that is not like a sugar coating, but part of respectful and keen observation. The whole truth of an image is a full and well rounded thing. One could also say that the basic principles of rhetoric apply to the genres of instructive illustration: it is not enough to present facts, unless they are (in the same move) presented in such a fashion as to engage interest and trust. A sloppy illustration is not very likely to inspire the trust or engagement that a well crafted and accurate image contributes to. Then, the more I look into it, the more I get aware of the difficult tradeoffs between printing quality and mass affordability. Cheap print may easily ruin a good original illustration - but, being an image maker myself, I'm naming no names.