Are you smarter than a landscape student?

Marisa Palmieri | October 2010

Student Career Days competition

How it works:
A maximum of two students per school enter each ID competition and are required to identify a group of 50 annual and perennial plants by botanical name (genus and species) and common name. A master list of plants that could appear in the competition is posted on the website before the event. The competition is 1 hour and 50 minutes long (55 minutes per participant.)

How to score:
Following the Student Career Days' scoring conventions, for each specimen give yourself:
0.5 points for correct spelling
0.5 points for genus
0.5 points for species (and cultivar, if applicable)
0.5 points for common name

Then multiply your total by 5 (since we only have 10 specimens and not 50).

Can you rattle off plants’ botanical and common names? And spell them correctly to boot? Whether you learned the technical side of the green industry from text books or on the fly in the early days of your business, at some point you learned to identify pests and plants out in the field. (Or maybe you hired someone who can!)

At PLANET’s Student Career Days event, which takes place every spring, green industry college students compete in ID competitions – and other events equipment operations, cost estimating and more.

We drew inspiration from these student competitions to create our “Are you smarter than a landscape student?” quizzes. This month: annual and perennial plant ID.

Did you beat this year’s student winners in the annual and perennial plant ID competition? They are:

1. Chattahoochee Technical College’s CassieTempleton  87.50
2. North Carolina State University’s Katie Pound  87
3. Chattahoochee Technical College’s Cheryl Gress  83.50
4. Penn State’s Margaret Hoffman  83
5. Columbus State Community College’s Amanda Boggs  82.50
6. University of Maryland’s Todd Colvin  81.50

Click here for a downloadable PDF.