I live in South Oxfordshire, and I'm a Professional Gardener, Horticulturalist and Botanist, competent at IDing garden plants, trees and shrubs, and pretty much all of the vascular plants found in woodland settings.
Wild flowers, however, were something of a closed book to me, until a couple of years ago, when I started getting interested in them as well. Up to that point, professionally, they were all just "weeds" and to be dealt with in a particular manner.
However, I'm now extending my ID skills to include wild flowers. This has meant a whole heap of wandering around lonely fields and hedgerows with a reference book and a hand lens.
I belong to the Oxford Botany Email Loop, a loose collection of botanists in and around Oxford, who meet up from time to time to carry out surveys, or just for the pleasure of botanising.
Over the past few months I've also been introduced to iSpot, which is a fantastic resource for plant ID. I find that I sometimes struggle to make an ID from a photo, especially when the photos are not very clear, or don't show the parts of the plant that I need to see. But it's very good practice, and it's nice to be able to share knowledge: there are some fantastically knowledgeable people on iSpot, and they are all very happy to explain and encourage.
One quirk of iSpot is that they don't have a chat facility, and they don't allow individual messaging, so I've created this resource to allow people to contact me by email, at Rachy.Ramone@gmail.com if they want to.
I've also taken the opportunity to create three Helpful Hints pages for making better iSpot Observations, and I hope that you find them interesting and helpful.
