[thechat] WhatThePlant?

[Judah McAuley]

You want what is known as a dichotomous key. Each step offers you two 
choices and you refine from there. I didn't find any online dichotomous 
key's for NorCal vascular plants online though, but it was a cursory 
look. The gold-standard plant identification book for California is 
called the Jepson Manual. It's available online at: 
http://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/interchange/I_treat_indexes.html but 
unfortunatly, it isn't presented as a dichotomous key.

I'm not sure it would really do you any good though as indoor plants are 
usually from a nursery and aren't really likely to be native to the 
area. So you'd probably be better served by a generic plant 
identification guide. The best looking one I've found so far is 
Neoflora: http://www.neoflora.com/search.html

Hope that helps.

Judah

Canfield, Joel wrote:
> I'm looking for an online tool a la 'what the font' that'll ask me a
> series of salient questions to identify the mysterious plants around our
> office (people bring 'em in randomly, move 'em from place to place, then
> leave and nobody knows what most of 'em are.) 
> 
> I used to be in landscaping, so I can identify most SoCal outdoor
> plants, but these are NorCal indoor plants, and I'm persistently
> stumped.