Go Botany

A database of the plants of New England, run by the Native Plant Trust.

Website: https://gobotany.nativeplanttrust.org/

Go Botany is a plant database run by the Native Plant Trust, a non-profit plant conservation organization based in Framingham, MA, and the oldest plant conservation organization in the US. The Go Botany database covers the entirety of New England, but only New England.

We have linked primarily to the individual species profiles on Go Botany's website. These pages contain images, which are a mix of copyrighted and open-licensed photos, and occasional illustrations. The profiles do not have an extensive article, but do have a brief summary of each plant and an even briefer, often one-line, summary of the plant's habitat preferences in New England. There are range maps for New England as well as North America as a whole, both of which use data from BONAP. Although Go Botany mostly sticks to BONAP, there are a few cases where they have deviated from the treatment used by BONAP and/or report different information about plants' ranges and/or status in a region.

For some plants, there are listings of commonly-confused species along with characteristics to distinguish them. These listings can be among the most useful resources for rigorous plant ID. Keep in mind however, when looking at this material, that the site is limited to New England and thus may omit commonly-confused species that only occur in other parts of a plant's range, and may also cite ID characteristics that are variable or unreliable in other regions of the plants' ranges.

Besides specific plant pages, Go Botany has numerous other resources, including several different types of plant keys to help identify unknown plants. The site also has a function called PlantShare which allows you to report observations of plants. Although Go Botany is focused on New England, PlantShare covers the entire US.