So you want to identify a plant?

Recent comments about the Friday fabulous flower demonstrate once again how different are the perceptions of "professional botanists" and most everyone else. When faced with an unknown plant your choices are to ask a professional (and please remember that a tip sufficient to purchase a halfway decent bottle of wine, or about 10% of a botanist's monthly salary, which ever is larger, is only polite) or use some sort of plant identification manual. Picture books are OK for amateurs, and this includes the physician that was thumbing through a Peterson wild flower field guide as yours truly entered the local poison control center after having been urgently summoned to identify an ingested plant. The Peterson wild flower guide for the NE North America is a quite nice enough book for hikes, but bloody hell, if your life depends on it, you be heading for trouble. Imagine the reaction if said physician caught the Phytophactor thumbing through a picture guide called "Appendectomy made easy" with a patient just waiting for my assistance. Oh, the asymmetry would be amazing! So when advanced students take plant identification they use a field guide like the 900 page (no pictures) Manual of Vascular Plants of the NE USA. This manual employs what we in the plant ID biz call keys; tables of choices, usually two, and if you consistently make the right choice based upon what you observe, it leads to a family, a genus, and a species. Ta da! But as my students soon discover, you must be both careful and discerning to be successful. Identification begins by categorizing the basic characteristics which places you into a key that will lead to a family identification. Here's the list of characteristics for selecting general keys (sections). Note that the authors rather expect that you can recognize pteridophytes, monocots, and woody plants right out of the gate. And while the floral characteristics look pretty picky, this is just the beginning. One of my students this spring only made two errors all semester! You can admire his proficiency, but in this business experience really really counts, so the big guy (PP) is still the big guy where is counts the most.
Section 1 – General Key to other sections
Section 2 – Pteridosperms & Clubmosses (non-seed vascular plants)
Section 3 – Gymnosperms
Section 4 – Epiphytes and branch parasites
Section 5 – Inflorescences modified into bulblets or tufts of leaves
Section 6 – Monocots
Section 7 – Dicot trees, shrubs, & woody vines
Section 8 – Herbaceous dicots; unisexual flowers
Section 9 – Herbaceous dicots; perfect flowers, no perianth
Section 10 - Herbaceous dicots; perfect flowers, one whorl of perianth, inferior ovary
Section 11 - Herbaceous dicots; perfect flowers, one whorl of perianth, superior ovary
Section 12 - Herbaceous dicots; perfect flowers, calyx & corolla present, two or more ovaries
Section 13 - Herbaceous dicots; perfect flowers, calyx & corolla present, inferior ovary (1)
Section 14 - Herbaceous dicots; perfect flowers, calyx & corolla present, flowers bilaterally symmetical, one superior ovary, & stamens more numerous than divisions of the corolla.
Section 15 - Herbaceous dicots; perfect flowers, calyx & corolla present, flowers radially symmetrical, one superior ovary, & stamens more numerous than divisions of the corolla.
Section 16 - Herbaceous dicots; perfect flowers, calyx & corolla present, flowers with separate petals, one superior ovary, stamens as many as petals or fewer.
Section 17 - Herbaceous dicots; perfect flowers, calyx & corolla present, flowers radially symmetrical, corolla tube present, one superior ovary, stamens as many as lobes of the corolla.
Section 18 - Herbaceous dicots; perfect flowers, calyx & corolla present, corolla tube present, either very bilaterally symmetrical OR stamens fewer than lobes of corolla.

For the record, both shoot stars and nightshades would be found using Section 17; the snowbell would be in Section 13, except it is a woody plant, so you would use Section 7 (and so is Solanum jasminiodes except it isn't in this manual at all).