#practical botany

Hello!

Congrats on graduating college soon. I’ll just say, don’t feel disillusioned just because college didn’t teach you how to identify plants. I, too, went to college for plant stuff and, though my experiences were likely very different from yours, I didn’t learn a lick of identification through college. I just didn’t absorb that sort of information that easily in that environment.

Rather, everything I know about identifying plants, I know from just walking around and encountering them. If you can, visit the same wild places - a wide variety of wild places, like a forest, meadow, lakeside - very often. Every few weeks if not every week. See what new things are growing each time, and take note of them. If possible, have a method of making them memorable to you; for me, that’s often photographing them, but for others, taking a notebook and writing down the date and information about the location is the trick. I even had a professor in college who said that he had an identification book that was in black and white and every time he encountered and identified a new plant, he’d color it in, and in that way he never forgot them. You could even bring a notebook and draw them, if you are talented enough for that.

What winds up being invaluable is simply learning the different morphology of plants that is key in identification. How many petals does it have? What shape is the leaf margin? Does it have a flower stalk, or is it fused? How are the flowers arranged? How are the leaves arranged on the stem? How big is it, is it woody, does it have a smell, etc. If you can’t remember this information in your head, write all of this down for any unidentified species you encounter, and when you get home, identify it immediately. Read the name out loud. Read the scientific name over and over until the Latin rolls comfortably off your tongue. Read the wikipedia article, if it has one. Just spend a few minutes immersing yourself in that species. I promise it will be hard to forget after that.

This is yet another reaction paper I made during my first year in UPLB. This paper is for our Agronomy Trip in NASC8 (Practical Botany). I enjoyed that course a lot, and it certainly shows in my grades. (Wooh! 1.25! :DDD) I do get high grades in my subjects that I love and enjoy, compared to those I don't like (Math 11. D<). 

Maybe just by reading you'll get the idea of what we did during the trip. Or maybe not. Nevertheless, I'll provide a brief summary. We were shown how to make coffee and tablea chocolates. There was also a brief discussion of the coffee and the cacao plant and their varieties. After the coffee and cacao lesson, we were lead to a rubber tree where they showed us how to tap it to get the latex that will be used in making rubber. Later, we were shown how to get the fiber from abaca and how to harvest coconuts and make kopra. Agriculture is sooo fun.

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               It was my first time to go to the Agronomy and Horticulture building here in UPLB, because I did not have any classes in the building in my first and second semester as a Freshman student.

I enjoyed the lectures a lot, and I became prouder about UP Los Baños when I learnt that we have the facilities in making chocolate and coffee; a small plantation of coffee and rubber trees, as well as cacao, abaca and coconut; and of course, we have talented people who specializes in researches and studies about these plants.

The tour brought me back to my province. I remembered my grandmother well, because of the tablea chocolates. She makes good Tsamporado (Champorado) by using tablea. Her recipe, as well as my mother’s is the only Tsamporado I eat because I am a known hater of the particular delicacy since birth and Nanay was the only one who convinced me to have a taste of it.

The coffee also reminded me of my mother’s hometown. We sometimes visit Capalonga – a small town in the province of Camarines Norte which is famous for the original Black Nazarene – every summer with our relatives. We have a farm there, which is managed by my grandfather and grandmother, my uncle, and some of my cousins. The farm has a pond or two filled with Tilapias, a koprahan, and there are some livestock bred in there too. There is also land planted with rice, vegetables, trees, and Tatay’s latest addition to the farm – coffee.

The coffee is planted on top of a hill, which is a pain to climb, not to mention getting down, because the sides are very steep. The first and maybe the last time my cousins and I braved to climb the hill, we were disappointed when we found out that the coffees are unavailable to us at the moment. Tatay forgot to tell us earlier that the plants dried up because of the heat.

However, I did see some coffee beans spread on bilaos inside the house in Capalonga. We were all curious about why they were left there, untended by my grandfather. Now I know that he’s using the dry method to make the beans into coffee.

The coconuts will never fail to remind me of the province, especially the simple life in Capalonga. There were copras sold around the town, and our farm also makes some. But what I really enjoy is the coconut meat, though I’m not sure if it is also part of the meat. Nanay gives us these sponge-like meat inside the coconut, which we devour joyfully. Also, the buko – especially the juice and the meat – reminds me a lot of my father, who is very fond with what he calls Tipong. In our house in Daet, there are some occasions when someone sells us Tipong, which my father then buys.

Abaca products are abundant in our province. The town center of Daet showcases a lot of these, along with the Pili and Pineapple products. What abaca reminds me a lot is the sandals that we were required to wear when we have a cultural dance presentation since Kindergarten.

However, not all of the plants that were shown to us reminded me of the life in the province. To be honest, it was my first time to see a Rubber tree, or just the first time I was able to recognize one. I might have played around a rubber tree before, but was not just able to identify it as one.