Not all botanists are gardeners but are all gardeners botanists? If you ask a gardener whether they’re a botanist most will probably tell you they know a little about plants and then name most of the plants in the garden using a Latin or a Greek tag. True you don’t need any formal botanical training to be a good gardener, but most people with an interest in plants just absorb the knowledge as they go along.
I must admit that I was taught botany before I became a gardener. I started my own herbarium collection at the age of five in an innocent age when little girls collected wild flowers, pressed them and put them in a scrapbook. It is perhaps a testament to my later formal teaching that I can still put most flowers in the correct family.  However, I still come a little unstuck at times when the plant has no flower, although I can recommend The Vegetative Key to the British Flora by Poland and Clement. So when Himself presented me with a very brittle, dry, old flower stem and asked me what it was, I just raised an eyebrow. My best guess an umbellifera and probably Hogweed Heracleum sphondylium.
Two days later I was informed that the aforesaid plant was Wild Angelica, Angelica sylvestris. Now this came as a surprise as I didn’t know it grew on our croft, but there are obviously a few plants in a boggy bit on the far side of the headland – not an area I visit very often in the summer as this is where the snipe and redshank breed – well that’s my excuse. The jaw dropping element was that he’d managed to identify the plant from a dried up old flower stem – had I missed some key characteristic?  What I had missed where some small black dots on the stem (apothecia – fruiting bodies). Himself had identified these as Heterosphaeria patella a cup fungus which only grows on Wild Angelica.