All in the Family

Patrick and I are leaving for Colorado late next week so we've been reading our Colorado hiking and nature books in preparation for the big trip. We found a great field guide called Plants of the Rocky Mountains by Linda Kershaw, Andy MacKinnon and Jim Pojar. The problem I'm having is that the book is arranged in such a way that it would be helpful to know the family of the flower you're trying to identify (the master key is a list of plant families). I've been going around the past year learning about flowers and simply calling them by their common names but not paying too close attention to the families they belong to and certainly not their Latin names. I can recognize a pea, a carrot, an aster and (most of the time) an orchid and a rose but there are many more families to learn.

In my quest to learn to identify plant families, I've found a few helpful websites. This one was created by a college professor to help his students learn to recognize "60 flowering plant families". This site breaks down the flower parts to help identify which family the plant belongs to. It's a very informative site that I've learned a lot from already.

If anyone knows of other sites or books that would be helpful, please let me know. There's so much to learn. I can only hope to get a basic "gist" of the families commonly found in the Rockies by next week. Wish me luck!