Learning how to identify plants in your pasture is essential for various reasons. You’ll want to get rid of anything toxic to horses. You might also want to get rid of unnutritious weeds that can suck water and soil resources away from desired plants. It’s also just a lot of fun to know what’s growing. There are so many plants just in Fantazia’s little pasture, I haven’t come close to identifying all of them!
See my later post on my horses’ current pasture and what is and should be growing there:
What’s growing in my pasture?
Jump to:
My favorite app for identifying plants
Books on plants
Other resources
I am no expert. I believe an expert would be an agronomist who specializes in forage. Perhaps I will interview one for a later blog post!
In the meantime, I thought I’d share my easy-way of identifying plants. Preview: I use phone apps as a first step (Details below.) And mostly, I do this for fun. I learned how to identify potentially dangerous plants that grow around here when I was a child. But my apps provide confirmation and more information.
I also love to identify plants in general, just because. I am particularly enthusiastic about dudleya and cacti, as a few riders could attest… They’ve seen me stop mid-endurance ride just to take pictures or identify a plant! Or they could have come upon Fantazia waiting patiently for me to scramble up and dowl a slope to take a picture… Ground-tying is an essential skill for my horses!
Above: Left, Fantazia waiting for me to take pictures of silver cholla at the Fire Mountain Pioneer Ride. Right, a Chalk dudleya sighted at the Sesenta Años Pioneer Ride. I had to climb up a small cliff to take that picture. Fantazia waited below, patiently.
Some undesirable plants that could be in your pasture
Some plants are poisonous, and if the pasture is poor and your horses aren’t getting enough hay, they will eat almost anything. Fiddleneck, for example, is toxic if consumed in large quantities. Horses don’t tend to like it, but I’ve noticed that Fantazia will eat fiddleneck if she picks some up in a mouthful of grass. (Just one more thing to worry about!) Night shades are also poisonous, but horses tend to avoid it too. Most fiddleneck and nightshade poisonings are the result of contanimated feed rather than horses eating them in the pasture.
You might also need to keep an eye on what is just outside your pasture. For example, the ornamental oleander is extremely toxic, and your non-horsey neighbors might want to plant it.
Not all undesirable plants are toxic…
Some plants are just unpleasant and/or could hurt your horse. A few weeks ago Fantazia and I had an encounter with stinging nettle (details in Horse Reactions to Stinging Nettle). Horses aren’t bothered by poison oak, but humans are, so it’s nice to be able to identify it too.
We don’t have poison oak in our pastures, and we’d get rid of it if we did. We don’t get rid of the nettles or the many thistles. I plan to cook them though!
Most plants in our pastures are horse-edible grasses
There are also trees, and a lot of flowers in spring. It’s a lot of fun to identify them, which is the first step to learning a lot more information.
Above: Left, the Seek app screen after (correctly) identifiying stinging nettle. Right, a recent picture of more stinging nettle.
My favorite app for identifying plants
I use Seek. It’s affiliated with iNaturalist, which means you can upload your plant “finds” to inaturalist. Seek on its own is completely private. Seek can identify plants in real time; it will suggest you dry another angle if it doesn’t imdeiately recognize something. Once Seek has identified a plant, you can take a picture. That saves your “observation” to your Seek app on your phone. Observations are not saved anywhere else, which is good (privacy) but bad (what if your phone dies?). Observations you upload to iNaturalist are saved permanently in your account.
Seek gives you a lot of information, including a full taxonomy and whether the plant is native or introduced. Sometimes it provides snippets from the appropriate Wikipedia page. (When there isn’t much of a wiki page, you don’t get much of a snippet!)
Above: Seek screens. The app can identify just about anything, and lets you know what species have been identified near your location. You can upload observations to iNaturalist if you want confirmation or a permanent record of your sighting. You can also search your observations (right).
Seek does make mistakes, so you also have to think. If it gives you an identification you know is wrong, well, it’s wrong. It works best when you are online (have a data connection), because it uses location to better identify plants. However, Seek can give you a starting point for further identification.
Above: One Seek identifies a plant, it gives you information about it. How much information depends on the plant and your internet connection. In the example above, it gave me quite a large excerpt from Wikipedia about Silverleaf Nightshade (left). It will always give you the taxonomy (center). If you have data or WiFi, you can open up the Wikipedia entry from the app (right).
iNaturalist
If you want some some corroboration, you can upload your Seek observation photo directly to iNaturalist. There, people will chime in with identifications. Once at least two other people have identified it, it’s considered a “research grade” id (provided you have a photograph with GPS coordinates and time stamp).
iNaturalist is free (for iOS and Android, and they have a great website). It’s sponsored by the National Geographic Society and the California Academy of Sciences. You can use the app or website to explore (search for sightings of different species). The idea behind iNaturalist is to build knowledge that will allow scientists and aficionados to better understand nature.
I cannot remember how I discovered the Seek app, but my brother suggested iNaturalist a long time ago. You don’t need Seek to use iNaturalist. You can take a photo directly from iNaturalist, or you can add one that’s already in your photo library.
Above: Screens of identified plants. Of course, I already recognized these plants, though we call Stork’s-bill “filaree.” I encourage Fantazia to eat filaree because it’s fattening (and it’s horrible when it dries, making nasty spiralling things that dig into socks and shoes and skin). Fiddleneck is always horrible, and bad for horses.
Other apps that can help you identify plants
Of course, there are other apps that can help you to identify plants in your pasture. I have downloaded several. However, I have yet to find one I like as well as Seek. None will identify plants before taking a picture. Of course, I have only tried the free apps, or trial versions of paid ones.
There are also apps and websites that walk you through identifying plants (and fungi). For fungi, I use various methods if I am thinking of eating mushrooms!
Lists of apps that can help identify plants:
9 Best Plant Identification Apps of 2022 includes paid options.
9 Best Free Plant Identification Apps For Android & iOS is a useful list of free options, with pros and cons for each.
A slightly older list, and the only one I read that doesn’t mention iNaturalist, from Greenmatters.
Books on plants
Forest Service page with links to the books their botanists use.
Goodreads had a comprehensive list.
List from the Herbal Academy, presumably with a people-herb focus.
PlantSnap (an app option) has a good list of filed guides here.
Other resources
Of course, people have been identifying plants without apps for millennia. There are a lot of good resources, starting with your local Cooperative Extension. The Cooperative Extension system is part of the USDA and goes back to 1914 and basically provides local access to agricultural information relevant to the region. If you are in California, Calscape and the California Native Plant Society are an excellent resources.
I am sure there are similar groups throughout the US and the rest of the world. Google is your friend if you want information on specific plants or regions.