January 20, 2015

Botany is a hard field to find instruction in let alone an 8 day intensive field botany Summer Workshop course. The University of Canterbury in Christchurch, NZ offers this class for their Biology graduates. Non-graduate students were allowed to also take the course so I was able to take advantage of this wonderful class.

Pieter, plant ID, Temple basin

We spent the 8 days at the University’s Mountain Biological Field Station at Cass, which is in the Southern Alp area west of Christchurch. It was a big class, 22 of us, a good mix of University biology students as well as some of us older folk who were not students but wanted to learn more botany.

Our instructor Pieter Pelser did an excellent job of cramming a lot of information into 8 days and was always available to help with any questions. We actually covered everything that was in the course description, which was a lot. Read more