LINK INDEX
FUNGI
Plant pictures, plant identification, plants plants plants!
The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service
maintains quite an extensive database of plants, and this is
a link to it's query
system. It contains current
information and usually a few pictures of each plant along
with state distributions.
Hasn't been updated in a while, but
Stein's
virtual herbararium. Kenneth Stein has pictures
of many of the same plants taken in SW Virginia and WV to
help get a better view. Not a lot of information, but some
pretty and instructive pictures.
Grandfather
Mountain, NC is a habitat- and
species-rich environment that also is a private park. They
have some nice wildflower and historic exhibits at this
site.
The Brooklyn
Metropolitan Plant Encyclopedia is an interesting
plant-guide that includes discussions of various aspects of
plants. Makes you wanna go visit the Brooklyn Botanic
Garden, too.
The State
Botanical Garden of Georgia, has some wonderful
stuff.
The American
Association of Botanical Gardens and
Arboreta is a place to locate
websites of your favorite gardens that might need a local
visit or support from you.
If you're up on your biological terms and want
to investigate the different families of plants, the Cornell
Universities Families
of Flowering Plants, is a must-see. However, if
you're unsure whether a plant is anomocytic, or anisocytic,
or paracytic it might just be gobbledygook, especially if
the whole idea of urticating hairs frightens you. They do
have some very good drawings of various plants.
Hmm... weird. Built as a demonstration of
dynamic web-page building from a database, The Wildflowers
of NC Roadsides is a list of plants used in
the wildflower program to beautify interstates, and includes
many natural wildflowers. It has some information you won't
get anywhere else (such as seed/rate). Anyway, a lot of
pictures with some information.
Plantas
Medicinais. A great site and would be
greater if my Portugese language skills were any good.
Luckily, i can get the main gist because of my 3 years of
high-school Spanish. Still, the plant list is referenced by
the standard latin names and this site has pictures and
medicinal values along with toxicity and active ingredient
information.
While the work that the North Carolina State
University's Horticulture department has done is geared for
landscaping and in fact is called Urban
Tree Identification, it is worthwhile to use to
get to know trees, starting with the ones in your back yard.
Good pictures and information on habitat needs and general
characteristics.
One of the coolest and most fun
fungal website is Tom
Volk's Fungi, which is helped along by
the Department of Biology and Microbiology at the University
of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Tom is verbose about the darling
little things and even includes letters and questions about
them, a fungus of the month area, and lots of information
about his favorite, the incredible edible morel. He even has
a special "Life cycle of the Morel" and various pieces of
information that relates to eating various mushrooms. He has
a gopher site that has pictures of every form imaginable...
ok, well MANY forms. He also hosts the Mycological
Society of America webpage.
George Barron's fungal website is good too. He, like myself, has little interest in consuming the sex-parts of fungi, but loves to photograph them. Some very good information and even better pictures.
