Start With What You Can Know for Certain
The Beginner’s Rule
Start with the handful of Canadian plants that can be known with certainty — dandelion, wild raspberry, saskatoon, wild strawberry — and learn each one completely: every part, every season, and everything it can be confused with. One plant learned properly is worth fifty recognised from a photo.
Work through multiple field marks before anything is food: leaf, stem, flower, fruit, habitat, and season must all agree. If one mark disagrees, the answer is no, and the walk was still a good one.