Comment by picafrost

I find it a real shame that botany doesn't receive a larger share of the curriculum in school. Plants are ubiquitous (obviously), they've been here well before we have and will remain here well after we've gone extinct. Despite that, in my experience, the average person knows very little about how and why they are organized into taxonomies and what characteristics that gives them.

Seed pod? Square stems and opposite leaves? Five petaled flowers? All simple things to identify and dramatically narrow to a small set of families, if not one. And then the morphology between plants in those families becomes interesting to observe. And so it goes on.

Then again, a great number of people live in areas totally absent of any plants that aren't from a Home Depot, so that knowledge can scarcely be used. This is something Joey (the author) loves to rant about in his videos.