When it comes down to identifying a plant, what you need to do is to be able to recognize some of its characteristics like its fragrance, color, leaf shape, form, size, and when you put all of these together then you might be able to come up with its name.
Being able to identify a plant accurately simply shows that you can also be able to figure out how it grows as well as what it would cost to take care of it. Plants carry flowers for one part of the year and this is why identifying leaves is important. This article would show you how to identify plant leaves with ease.
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How To Identify Plant Leaves
Plants differ from one another. There are some that possess certain unique leaves which helps people identify them easily take for example the sugar maple leaf, it has the image of a Canadian flag and this is what helps people to identify it.
If the foliage shape of a plant isn’t known, this is when identifying the plant becomes very difficult and you may start looking at the flowers in your garden, wondering to yourself that how would you be able to tell which plant is different from the other.
One thing that would be helpful when identifying plants is that all leaves have two parts which is the stalk known as the petiole and the leaf blade which is also the biggest part of every leaf. The stalk works to attach the leaf to the stem and with each of these features, you would be able to tell which leaf is different from another.
The leaf blade is the first place that tells you what leaf you are dealing with exactly and this is because you would find some that are narrow, wide or some that have scales or needle shapes.
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If you have a leaf that is wide then you need to start paying attention to other characteristics that would be helpful in identifying plant leaves. Do you have just one leaf or a group of leaves attached to the stem through the stalk?
If what you have is a group of leaves then can you tell if they are palmates? Palmate means having more than a single leaf attached to the end of a stalk or do you have a pinnate which means having several leaves attached to a single stalk. The next part you should place your focus on is on the leaf lobes.
Every leaf can either be lobbed or not and in the case of Japanese leaf, they tend to have lobes that are deeply cut but Nastarium does not have any lobes at all. The last part of every leaf that you should take a look at when identifying leaves is the edge of the leaf. ENTIRE leaves are leaves which has smooth edges while other types of leaves have what we call toothed or notched edges.
Some Tips In Identifying Plants
When you want to identify plant leaves, there are other tips that we would like to mention to you and this is taking a look at the shape of the leaf as the shape of the leaf can either be elliptic, lanced shape, oblong or oval and round.
The way the leaf veins are patterned also helps in identifying plant leaves and the veins could either be prominent, like a net or parallel. You can also identify a leaf by how thick it is and you should be able to check if the leaf is leathery or delicate.
The leaf fragrance is also another feature that tells you the plant leaf in your hands and you can figure out its fragrance either by smoking it or crushing it.
Taking out time from your busy schedule to figure out these characteristics in every leaf would help you identify any leaf easily and the more information you have about any leaf also increases your knowledge about such leaf.
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