I am pretty hopeless when it comes to identifying plants. I know a few and have heard the names of more but I always forget them. But this trip I have been having fun identifying the plants we see. There are so many interesting ones.
The reason I have been doing it is the advent of plant identification software on my phone. For a while I was using google lens, which you invoke from google photos but I started using the one built into my iPhone camera because it is a little easier to invoke on my phone.
Years ago I got a few, easy-to-use identification keys. With them you went through a series of questions with two possible answers and finally got to the identification. They were fun but didn’t always work and were limited in the range of plants they worked on. I have always wished I had a magic way to identify any plant. Well, that magic is real now and easy to use. You take a photo and few taps later you are at the Wikipedia entry for the plant.
It is not always correct but probably more than 95% correct. It is based on billions of photos of plants with metadata about what they are. If lots of people are wrong about a plant then it will be wrong too. Or sometimes it comes up with something clearly wacky, kind of like the “hallucinations” of chatGPT.
I collected all my plant identification photos in an album. So if you want to see what we are seeing go there and fire up google lens on the photos.