A Library and a Garden Is All You Need: Self-Study Botany, Bugs, and Fungi

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Aristotle said the educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living differ from the dead. Harsh, but it sets the bar. The bar is open to anyone, and the entry fee is about the price of a cheap Android tablet.

The proof is a reading list from Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t, the profane botany channel run by Joey Santore that is exacting about its science. “So You Want to Teach Yourself Botany” is the best free syllabus I’ve found for natural history, and it keeps growing: botany first, then entomology and mycology once you see how they interlock.

  1. Anyone can start, and the entry point is a library, not a classroom. The list opens by telling you not to be intimidated, that the internet gives you 24-hour access to the library, and to look up every word you don’t understand. There is no gatekeeper. I went in knowing nothing and read the whole thing in an afternoon.

  2. Latin names are the key, and they’re not pretension. “Cedar” refers to eight unrelated plants; Cedrus names one exact genus. Once you accept the Linnaean system, genus capitalized and species lowercase and both italicized, every plant in the world gets a precise handle.

  3. The core skill is taxonomy, which is just grouping by evolution. Once you learn what unites a family or a genus, you can identify plants you’ve never seen before. The recommended textbook, Plant Systematics by Michael Simpson, teaches it family by family and order by order, and the third edition is current enough to last you a decade.

  4. The garden is the lab. Pressing a branch in an old cookbook, drying it, and uploading an observation to iNaturalist with GPS and elevation is real field botany, done at home. Every pressed specimen is a lesson you can revisit.

  5. Bugs go with plants. Once you know a plant you start noticing who eats it, pollinates it, and lives on it, and entomology is the same skill of observation. The reading list points to The Ecology of Plants; for the bug side I’d add For the Love of Insects by Thomas Eisner as the first book, plus The Bees in Your Backyard for the pollinator half.

  6. Fungi connect both worlds, and they’re the hidden half of the story. Most plants only thrive because of mycorrhizal partnerships under the soil, so mycology is the bridge, not optional trivia. Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake is the best gateway; the list’s The Fungi by Sarah Watkinson is the serious textbook when you want depth.

  7. You might think this needs a mentor, a course, or a university herbarium. The list’s whole point is that it doesn’t. The bar is the ability to press a plant, photograph it, and compare against a flora or a database. What separates the educated naturalist from the uneducated one is not credentials, it’s the habit of looking closely and naming what you see.

The takeaway: buy a $60 Android tablet, load it with the free PDFs from the reading list, and pick one plant a week to press and identify. Within a year you’ll recognize families on sight, which is more botany than most graduates ever use.

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