Joseph Gardens – Botanizing: The best hobby you’ve never heard of: “The quickest way to describe botanizing is that it is like bird-watching, but for plants. To botanize, you go out into natural areas and look for plants growing in the wild, maybe hoping to see new species or particularly impressive populations of familiar species. Professional botanists do this to monitor the health of species, track the impacts of threats to their habitats, and better understand their natural ranges and ecology. Amateur botanists, like me, do it for fun. I think I first heard botanize used as a verb when I was in graduate school. I was floating down a river in a canoe with a bunch of other grad students studying plant science (none of us botanists) and one of them pointed to a bank and said, “I’ve botanized up there – found some nice orchids.” I nodded intelligently as I puzzled out this unfamiliar verb form of the word botany, pretending I knew what he meant…”