Learn Plant Families to Help You Grow as a Gardener

There are always lots of things to learn as a gardener, and many of them can only be learned through doing—through actually getting out there and getting your hands dirty. But there are some things gardeners can learn from reading, watching, or listening.

While most of us are not botanists and may have less interest in studying botany or plant biology in depth, learning plant families and other botanical basics can often really help us to grow as gardeners.

When we garden, we often simply learn the common names of plants. But they also have formal scientific, Latin names. These names help to categorize plants, and while not always fixed, those categorizations can help make things clearer for identifying, using, and studying those plants.

Specific plants are specific varieties of particular species. Species are members of a certain genus. And each genus belongs within a broader plant family.

For example, plants in the Lamiaceae family (mint family) include garden herbs such as lavender, basil, mint, oregano, thyme, and rosemary.

Plants in the same family all share certain physical characteristics that can help us to see their relationship to one another and which help us to identify them. In the Lamiaceae family, for instance, members will generally have aromatic leaves, among other shared characteristics. (See more on the mint family below.)

Learning plant families can be a great step forward for those who want to be able to identify more of the plants around them.

Even when we cannot identify plants down to species and variety, knowing which family they belong to can often give us a lot of the information we need. When we can identify different plant families we can narrow down the field to identify specific