WHEN SPRING APPROACHES and we get out into the garden again, it’s easy to get distracted by the to-do list, or just by the latest pretty thing that’s emerging after winter’s relative blank slate. But there’s a whole other layer out there in front of our eyes and ears and noses, and it’s actually the foundation layer of life.

How about we gardeners learn to tune in not just to the horticultural happenings outside, but to the wonders of botany unfolding before us?

Ben Goulet-Scott and Jacob Suissa encourage us to follow our curiosity to look closely and learn how the plant world works—to botanize. Ben and Jacob are evolutionary biologists who have created a popular social media presence together, plus a nonprofit educational foundation, and now a new book—all appropriately called “Let’s Botanize.”

Their idea is to use entertaining content to encourage people to follow their curiosity and take a closer look at what’s growing around them, and in the process, learn more intimately about the intricacies of the botanical world.

When not out botanizing, Ben oversees educational programming at Harvard Forest. Jacob teaches evolutionary plant biology at the University of Tennessee.

Plus: Comment in the box near the bottom of the page to enter to win a copy of “Let’s Botanize,” their new book (affiliate link).

Read along as you listen to the March 9, 2026 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).

‘let’s botanize,’ with jacob suissa and ben goulet-scott

Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 00:26:39 | Recorded on March 6, 2026

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Margaret Roach: How are you guys?

Jacob Suissa: So good. It’s great to be here.

Ben Goulet-Scott: Thanks for having us.

Margaret: The book is beautiful. And of course, I’ve always enjoyed the Instagram reels and posts and so forth. They’re wonderful, and you have a great following there, so that’s been fun. How long have you been doing that, the social media thing?

Jacob: Thanks so much. Yeah, we’ve been doing it for about six years now.

Margaret: Oh!

Jacob: Yeah. So actually it started… humble beginnings actually. When Ben and I were graduate students at Harvard University, in particular, our labs were based at the Arnold Arboretum. So Let’s Botanize really started as us going out into the woods or the grounds of the Arnold Arboretum and just botanizing. And initially we really just had these amazing experiences hanging out together, looking at plants, talking about different aspects of their morphology, their pollination syndromes, their ecology and evolution. And we thought that it would be a great idea to share these experiences that we have on social media, for everyone else to enjoy.

Margaret: So I love that you guys say you want to activate our curiosity, because to me, gardening, that’s what it’s all about, is curiosity—is indulging and encouraging our curiosity. And how you compare what you call botanizing—adding the -ing at the end of botany, or the -zing, actually, at the end of botany [laughter]—how it’s sort of like, as you say I think in the book, the way that there’s birds and there’s bird-ing, the active part of it. So tell me a little bit about it: What’s botanizing?

Ben: Yeah, absolutely. So botanizing, it’s a natural-history hobby. So it’s a lot like birdwatching, but for plants. And it’s the natural-history hobby that’s based around being curious about paying close attention to plants, and trying to learn more about them and appreciate them as organisms. And as much as we would love to have invented that word, it’s actually an older term. It peaked in popularity in the mid-19th century [laughter], and it’s sort of been declining in usage since then, but we would love to be part of a wave of people bringing that word back and the idea of that hobby back.

Margaret: Yes. Total aside, my late-Victorian era grandmother on my mother’s side actually went to college. She went to college at what’s now part of the University of Wisconsin. And one of the courses that she took, besides lots of sort of domestic arts kinds of things that women were allowed to do then [laughter], was botanizing. And so she became-

Ben: Oh, that’s amazing.

Margaret: She had a flower press and she pressed specimens and she … So anyway, botanizing was a thing. So yeah, I loved that you did that [laughter]. I knew that it was from a long time ago.

So anyway, so speaking of birds and birding and then botanizing, in the opening of the book, you have a page that says something that I loved also. It says, “There are more species of grass than birds, more mints than mammals, and more beans than butterflies.”

Now, of course, people probably know more about the latter in each pair of those than the former, but even if we know the name of the plant—because this isn’t just about plant ID, that’s not what your botanizing is, memorizing names of plants—what else do we need to know?

Jacob: Yeah, that’s a great question. And so, I mean, I think we use those sets of facts about plant and animal sort of species richness to really just highlight the staggering diversity of plants [laughter]. I think it’s amazing and sometimes overwhelming. But I think one point is that because plants are so diverse, if your end goal was to identify all the time and to identify every single plant, it’s just impossible. And so there’s sort of other layers of botanizing that can be extremely rewarding.

I want to say identification is a very fun goal of botany, and it also is an enriching one and it’s an important one, and we do it a lot. I think it elevates your relationships with plants, and it’s sort of critical in a lot of, of course, scientific studies, but again, it’s not the end goal.

So you can appreciate things like plant form, right? What’s the sort of shape of this leaf, or the architecture of a tree. Or you can appreciate things like pollination syndromes, which we mentioned earlier. So what is the structure or morphology of a flower, and how do we think that that interacts with the way that this plant is pollinated? You can think about things like the ecology of the plant. Where is it growing? Why is it growing where it’s growing? Who is it growing near? And you can also start to think about sort of evolutionary processes, right? Why did these particular traits evolve? How did they evolve? What are the common ancestors of this one plant, and what sort of traits did they have?

And more broadly, you can botanize by relating to plants, thinking about the timescales that plants grow on. Those can be very slow if you’re thinking about a tree that’s a thousand years old or so, but likewise, you can think about the very rapid processes that plants undergo, including the way they move water through their body, or how they do gas exchange or the sort of cellular processes that happen on timescales that we also can’t understand.

Margaret: I mean, just the grass thing in that statement that you made, there’s more grasses than whatever-

Ben: Than birds.

Margaret: I mean, I think it said that 30 percent of the earth’s landmass is covered in grasses, but how many of us even know, or even really consciously understand without thinking about it, that grasses are flowering plants?

Ben: Yeah, that’s right.

Margaret: And so what do we have to do? We have to get down on our knees and crawl around and have a hand lens in our hand. Is that a good idea? [Laughter.]

Ben: Absolutely. Yeah. So to analogize the whole hobby of botanizing to birdwatching, birdwatchers have binoculars and botanists and botanizers have a hand lens. And it’s really a small magnifying lens that’ll fit in your pocket or on a lanyard around your neck. Usually the ones that we use I think are 10x magnification. That’s usually about right for a lot of the structures that you want to get a closer look at on a plant.

But yeah, grasses have a lot to offer if you stop and catch them, especially when they’re flowering or when their fruits are maturing [below].

Margaret: And then you see, if you look, as you again point out in the book—and it got me thinking about it and I was like, “Oh, of course, they are probably not built for somebody to come and stick their body part in them or move their pollen around.” They’re not built for that, right?

Ben: Right. Absolutely.

Margaret: So how does it get pollinated? Huh? I wonder; huh? [Laughter.]

Ben: That’s great.

Jacob: Those are great questions.

Ben: And you did all of that without needing to know which of the 11-plus-thousand species of grass you were looking at, right? [Laughter.] So that’s a great example.

Margaret: So there is one example that it’s the wind, right, that’s its companion, its partner in pollination.

Ben: Almost all grasses are wind-pollinated.

Jacob: And there’s a lot of really interesting traits that are associated with wind-pollination. So within grasses, or really any other wind-pollinated plant, you don’t really need to invest in the structures that attract large visual or sort of scent-cueing animals. So there’s no—and I’m putting air quotes you can’t see—but there’s no need to invest in petals, large petals or showy structures. So a lot of these wind-pollinated plants like grasses have actually lost over evolutionary time, really highly elaborate petals and such.

And really you can sort of think about them as being fine-tuned, being highly adapted for wind-pollination. So what does that mean? It means that they also have large, pendant stamens. So those are the structures that produce pollen, and they sort of produce copious amounts of pollen that can easily fly in the wind.

They have these large, elaborate stigmas that are often feathery. So these are the parts of the female parts of the flower that collect pollen from the wind. So you can sort of read the evolutionary history in these lineages in these plants by just sort of looking at the structure sometimes. Sometimes it’s a little bit more difficult [laughter].

Margaret: And so the book is kind of divided into … It has, I think it’s 101 prompts. And they’re divided into three categories: parts, patterns, and perspectives. And so the parts one, it’s going around and looking closely. And for instance, you suggest, O.K., go and look at leaf edges; look at the edges of a bunch of different plants’ leaves. And are they all serrated or lobed, or are they all not that way—is that called entire?

Ben: Yeah. Entire margins [below].

Margaret: Entire. So what does that mean? Do we know what that means? So the observation then leads you to: Hmmmm, I wonder why? Just like what we just talked about with the grasses and how do they get pollinated and why are they like that?

Ben: Exactly.

Margaret: And then at least this whole lesson, potentially, if you want to do a little homework. So it’s kind of fun. [Laughter.]

Ben: Hopefully it is. And so the book has 101 of these prompts that try to get you activate your attention a little bit and get you out looking for something in particular. And then there’s a block of text after that, and that text is hopefully going to give you some more of the biology to understand and make sense of what you’re seeing.

And that’s really what the hobby is about. One thing that we talk a lot about is active observation. All natural-history hobbies are really trying to practice active observation, which you could think of active listening. You can hear stuff, but not really be actively listening. You can look at something and not really have made any sort of sophisticated observation of it.

And so what do you need to do to become an active observer? It’s really looking in order to understand. And so with that block of text and just all of the stuff that we do, we’re trying to help folks build their knowledge bank to really have context to make more sense of what they’re observing out in the plant world.

Margaret: I mean, there’s just such familiar things, again, in the book under just the parts department [laughter], the parts chapter: Climbers, go out and look at all the climbers in your garden. Do they all climb the same way?

Jacob: Absolutely.

Margaret: No, right?

Ben: There’s all kinds of different ways.

Jacob: And these prompts, as you were saying, they’re not just scattered throughout. So the different sections have different categories, right? So parts really focuses on morphology and structure. And patterns really focuses on things like development and evolution and ecology. And perspectives really allow us,  really tries to help us, connect more with plants as these living organisms that are so fundamentally different than us.

But back to your point about climbing plants, right? Yeah. So we think about these different categories of plants, climbers or herbs or epiphytes or whatever, but there’s many different ways to be these different plants, many different ways to be a climbing plant. So for instance, you can be a climbing plant that climbs up a tree because your stem twines around another stem. You can be a climbing plant like something like ivy that produces these small little rootlets on the underside of the stem that secrete essentially a glue that adheres to the structure it’s climbing up.

Other plants have evolved things like tendrils, which are highly modified either leaves or stipules or other parts of the plant that twine around the thing that it’s climbing up.

So there’s many different ways to climb. And actually this is a fascination, not just of us now, but also Darwin focused a lot on climbing plants as well. So there’s a deep history there.

Margaret: That’s fun. And thorns. I mean, we think, “Oh, the rose. Oh yeah, there’s thorns on the rose.” Well, but they’re not thorns, it turns out, because I guess by definition, according to the book, thorns are a particular type of tissue, and it’s not.

Ben: Right. Technically it’s only a thorn if it’s a branch, if the structure is ultimately developmentally a branch that’s been modified. And spines are leaves.

Jacob: But rose prickles don’t sound as good as rose thorns.

Margaret: That’s epidermis, that’s sort of skin, so to speak; it’s tissue is made from the epidermis, not from the branch.

Ben: Exactly.

Margaret: So it’s funny. It’s like we have these words that we use. It is a word, but it’s been misapplied slightly.

Ben: So we were both trained as plant biologists and as evolutionary biologists. And so when we think about an idea like it’s not just thorns, there are these very different strategies that have all evolved to converge upon being spiky and trying to keep things from eating you, right? Or there’s many different ways to be a climber.

When you see a pattern like that in nature where many different lineages have totally independently come up with their own strategy to do the same thing, that means it’s probably pretty helpful [laughter]. It’s pretty helpful to defend yourself with spikes. It’s pretty helpful to be able to climb up on a sturdier, taller plant than you and get more sunlight.

Jacob: And so one other thing about that is it’s not just thinking about the traits and the sort of ways of being as adaptations, but really thinking about the processes that led to them. How did they evolve those structures?

And some people might say, “Oh, well, it’s all a sharp thing, right? So what does it matter?” Well, it does matter because it tells you a lot about the evolutionary process itself. If it’s a sharp object that is derived from epidermis, you can understand and think backwards in time and think about how modifications of the epidermis led to the evolution of prickles, versus modifications of branches into thorns or modification of leaves into spines. And that’s not only sort of an important thing to think about from a scientific perspective, but we would argue an enriching thing to layer on top of your understanding of plants.

Margaret: So then there’s patterns, the section about patterns, and there’s so many different interesting ones. And so this is a great one, especially as spring begins: We go out and look around and see if we see patterns in the landscape, unrelated plants but exhibiting similar things—one was things that bloom extra early, before the leaves come out [like witch hazel, below]. What’s that about? Does that have a common explanation?

Or flowers that have no petals? Go around and look and see, like pussy willows [above], right? Go around and see if we can identify some; I guess that’s another good hand lens one.

Or I think you had one that was five-petaled plants like Phlox and geraniums and columbines. And go around your garden and look for, see how many plants have petals in fives or I guess multiples of fives, I don’t know. Anyway, these are things we wouldn’t think to do unless we were botanizing. So these are the patterns, yes?

Ben: Yeah, absolutely. And you gave a lot of great examples that you might see in horticulture, and it’s such like gardening and gardeners are so primed. I mean, they already are botanizing, whether they use that term for it or not, but there’s probably ways that they can dig deeper by getting curious about the aspects of plants that have less to do with how they grow or how they look.

But there are so many great examples of sort of oddball biology in the garden, because that’s why we selected that plant. “We love this plant because it flowers super-early,” or, “Oh, isn’t it funky that it puts flowers out before it has any leaves?” Those sorts of patterns we appreciate for their aesthetics.

But then if you get curious like one layer deeper and think about, “O.K., well, what is the biology there? Why does it do that? What’s the ecology?”

It turns out, so for instance, putting flowers out before leaves are out, super-early, is really helpful if you’re wind-pollinated again. So a lot of our big trees—oak trees, maple trees, that sort of thing—are often wind-pollinated. Or even if they are insect-pollinated, they’re probably trying to attract those very first insects that wake up out of diapause in the spring before they have a lot of competition. So it is a lot about getting a sort of pollination advantage to flower super-early.

Margaret: One that I loved was again, things that are ornamental and I’m attracted to them, for instance, the yellow trillium, Trillium luteum [below].  It has sort of a variegated leaf as do a number of sort of woodlander precious things, choice things of the woodland garden; they’re mottled, right? So what’s that? They didn’t do it to make it pretty so I’d like them. That’s not why they evolved that way [laughter].

Jacob: We’d like to think that, but no, you’re absolutely right. And so actually a lot of herbaceous understory plants that are evergreen or that are spring ephemeral have these sort of mottled, camouflage leaves. And there are many hypotheses to explain it, to explain why they do that. Some have to do with light, so excess light levels, or sort of trying to get as much light as possible in the early spring. But other hypotheses have to do with camouflage, sort of hiding your leaves in the sort of backdrop of the forest floor, against things like herbivores who want to eat your precious leaves that you’ve invested in.

And so sometimes these mottled leaves, you look at them and you’re like, “How is this camouflage?” But you might say the same thing about zebra stripes, right? So some of these really highly elaborate mottling patterns might sort of be disruptive coloring, and a lot of terrestrial orchids do this as well.

And so yeah, there’s many hypotheses that have been proposed for why they do it. And it’s likely that many different lineages have evolved these sort of mottled or camouflaged leaves for a variety of different reasons, some again being light and some again being sort of a defense mechanism against herbivory.

Margaret: It’s so interesting. And there’s 101 prompts in the book and there’s a million of them out in nature [laughter]. Yeah, that’s right. So the last section is perspectives. And I don’t know, Ben, do you want to give us a couple of those that you’d like us to leave us with, some of the perspectives of botanizing, so to speak?

Ben: Totally. This section’s maybe getting a little more philosophical, but it’s really tried to get you to re-imagine the ways in which plants are different from us. I think we have a great intuition for how animals work, especially vertebrate animals and especially mammals, because we have some intuition from our own lives and bodies. But we have very little intuition for how a plant works as an organism. And so that’s part of what this section is about.

And another part is trying to rediscover almost familiar things. Plants are so ubiquitous. We take a lot of them for granted, but a prompt like, “Spend 10 consecutive minutes with a tree” could hopefully, I think for a lot of people, unlock some things about what it might be like to live as that organism.

And then there are other prompts trying to get you to realize how much you interact with plants day to day, like, “How many different plant organs did you eat during a meal?” We’re eating all different kinds of plants all the time, and we have a real intimate familiarity with plant parts from food, but we might not think about it that way all the time.

Margaret: Well, I’m enjoying the book and I’m glad to meet both of you. And I’m looking forward to learning more—and I’m looking forward to the snow melting [laughter].

Ben: Absolutely.

Margaret: Although I could go out there and botanize and so forth now in different ways.

Ben: You can botanize in your kitchen [laughter].

Margaret: Or on some of the plants outside, even in the winter. But anyway, it’s great to meet you and thank you for both of you for making time today to talk. It was great.

Ben: Likewise.

Jacob: Thanks so much, Margaret.

(All photos courtesy of the authors.)

more from ‘let’s botanize’

• their instagram account
• their website and foundation 

enter to win a copy of ‘let’s botanize’

I’LL BUY A COPY of “Let’s Botanize” by Ben Goulet-Scott and Jacob Suissa for one lucky reader. All you have to do to enter is answer this question in the comments box below:

Is there something out in the garden or wider landscape that has particularly caught your attention and sparked your curiosity? Any botanizing adventures to report?

No answer, or feeling shy? Just say something like “count me in” and I will, but a reply is even better. I’ll pick a random winner after entries close at midnight Tuesday, March 16, 2026. Good luck to all.

(Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)

prefer the podcast version of the show?

MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 16th year in March 2025. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the March 9, 2026 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).