Are you interested in flowers, plants, foraging, or just nature in general? Are you looking for an excuse to meet new folks and eat ice cream? Well, consider joining us for a plant identification walk this Saturday!

We’ll meet at the MIT student center at 11 AM, and drive to Arlington’s Great Meadows (paradoxically located in Lexington, MA) to identify plants! We’ll each be armed with a copy of the old Audubon field guide to east North American wildflowers*, courtesy of the MITOC library. We’ll walk a lap around the park (a leisurely 2.1 miles with minimal elevation gain, according to AllTrails), identify some plants, and then head to downtown Lexington for some ice cream once we’re done!

The main focus of this walk will be to identify plants manually using paper field guides, as manual identification teaches you how to identify the plant yourself, and is a necessary part of safe foraging**. You’re also 100% welcome to use plant ID apps during this trip, as long as you’re okay with waiting for the rest of us to finish identifying the plant in question manually with our books.

We anticipate starting the walk around 11:30 AM, and finishing it and leaving to get ice cream around 1:00 or 1:30. So we anticipate returning to campus around maybe 2:30 PM or so, give or take an hour.

We may also run a short pre-trip meeting this Thursday evening.

(*If you’re wondering why it’s called a “wildflower” field guide and not a “plant” field guide, it’s because plants are generally easiest to identify while they’re flowering or fruiting. Because of this, plant field guides are usually structured around identifying plants by their flowers first, and then cross-referencing other features of the plant (leaves, stems, etc.) from there.)

(**Foraging refers to harvesting wild plants, mushrooms and such for food or for medicinal purposes, a hobby that both your trip leaders think is cool! We won’t be doing any foraging as a part of this trip, but if this is something you’d be interested in doing in the future, let us know!)