This guest post was written by David Deardorff and Kathryn Wadsworth, authors of What’s Wrong with My Plant?, and originally appeared on their blog.

I am immersed these days in the language of botany. It is just as though I have signed up for one of those immersion programs used to learn a foreign language. Which I guess is what I am really doing, after all. I had Latin in high-school, but can’t remember much of that.  But David knows the language well.  And in the classes we teach on Plant Identification, we talk about the features of plant flowers that tell us its name.

Botanical Illustrations show the technical features botanists use to identify plants. Here are some for you to enjoy:

The genus Penstemon illustrates features of the family Scrophulariaceae.

California poppy, Eschscholzia californica, is a member of the poppy family, Papaveraceae.

Evergreen huckleberry, Vaccinium ovatum, is a native shrub and a beautiful ornamental plant.