Imagine you see an amazing flower before your eyes, but you don’t have a camera. How could you capture it to tell your friends exactly what it looks like? Would you stare and study it to try and memorize every detail? Gosh, what if you forgot how many petals it had or if the leaf edges were serrated (like a saw) or smooth? My memory is pretty good, but not photographic!
Cameras are a fairly recent invention. The earliest surviving photograph is from the 1820s. Early plant scientists (botanists) didn’t rely on their memories to describe plants they saw. Instead, they took time to either draw/paint the plant or dry/flatten a piece of the plant to store mounted on the page of a book. Botanists are keen observers. Actually, all scientists are keen at observing details, but detail doesn’t always mean you need a magnifying glass or microscope.
As an experiment, see how good you are at observing details. Choose a vegetable or fruit from the fridge and draw it. The color, number of leaves, shape and length are essential for recording exactly what you see. Should you slice into the vegetable and draw the details found on the inside?
Show your drawing to another person and see if they can guess which vegetable you saw. If they had never seen a carrot before and it’s drawn on a piece of paper, would they know if it was as big a marker or might they wonder if a carrot is as tall as you?
