I'm totally confused on how to approach plant identification.

Buy a book about plants in your region.

A book with a good dichotomous key can definitely help, trying to picture key plants down to the species can be pretty difficult.

>>1034995
>how to approach plant identification.
There are roughly 422,000 known species of plant (iplants.org)
Don't try to learn every plant, that's just stupid.

Here's what you need to know: Any fruit shaped like a raspberry, any fruit resembling a strawberry, and any fruit that has a crown like a blueberry is edible (avoid smooth berries). All parts of all grasses and all parts of all brassicas are edible, raw or cooked. All ocean (not lake) seaweed is edible cooked. All bolettes that don't bruise blue are edible cooked.

>>1034995
Spending some time with someone who knows how to identify plants would help
Despite what the current generation thinks, not everything can be learned on the internet

>>1034995
You really can't learn plant identification on the internet, and all of those gimmicky apps are total ass for anything other than maybe some flowers, to be honest. Really, if you want to identify a plant and don't have an expert to teach you, you are going to have to spend a bit of time with field guides crouching next to plants outside. What field guides do you have? Are they appropriate to your region? What types of plants do they cover? Why do you want to know what these plants are? The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is a noble thing, sure, but practically speaking, you are more likely to find what you need the more you define your search. I'm unsure what you mean by field guides being useless, because they really aren't. Are you trying to read a field guide cover to cover? Because that's really not going to help you learn plants any more than reading through a math textbook without trying to solve any of the problems is going to help you learn math, unless you're some kind of savant. The process of learning plants around you is to go outside, find a plant you don't know, and try to identify it with your field guides. Make as many observations as you can about all the different parts of the plant. If the description does not 100% match your plant, it isn't it, so you may have to try something else. Field guides to plants are often sorted by things like flower color or plant family, but they will often include different indexes at the end to sort them by other features, so it's not like you can't narrow down your search with these books. But get this: you may not positively identify a plant the first time, and you may only find out what it is by stumbling on the answer weeks or years from then. If you can positively identify ONE new plant a day, or even one a week, you're already advancing at a fast pace. It's not an instantaneous or easy process. It is long, difficult, and tedious. There is a reason not many people know how to identify plants.

Learn the parts of plants and what different descriptor terms mean. Superior, inferior, pinnate, panicles, etc
Learn the families based on their general characteristics. Asteracea always have ray and disc flowers for instance. Fabaceae have flowers that look like little butterflies, etc.
If you want it down to species, get a book with a dichotomous key and start keying out plants.

Alternately take a plant taxonomy course at a university.

>>1035305
Horticulturalist here, with friends who forage for a living for posh nyc restaurants. I can confirm that this is wrong. don't listen to this dude. While what he said it GENERALLY accurate, you can't apply broad rules like this to things. you need to know your individual species or else you're doing yourself a disservice.

>>1034995
Cornus canadensis

>>1037413
Now, I'll grant you that there are a ton of plants and plant-like organisms out there that are perfectly edible that don't fall into those categories, and therefore it would certainly be beneficial to learn more than those few basic rules, but nothing I said there is incorrect.

If a person who isn't a specialist in the field of floral identification is lost in the wilderness and doesn't have a comprehensive field guide on their person, it's much better to know how to identify a few genera of plants than to assume they remember the difference between an edible and poisonous plant that look nearly identical.

>>1037550
That's definitely not bunch berry, probably Oxalis spp.

File: Identification.jpg (2MB, 2560x3128px) Image search: [Google]

2MB, 2560x3128px

>>1034995
Read this. It can help. There's no definitive database, unfortunately.

>>1037655
It is a variant of "Oxalis acetosella", but the image has been altered. Nailing it down more than that may prove difficult.