One of the things I wanted to explore in the Herbarium was how botanists organise the visual information from the plants, e.g. leaf and fruit shapes, colour etc. This is a fascinating study, there are so many new names and shapes to learn. I have found tables to describe colour, there is a wonderful book called "The Cambridge Illustrated Glossary of Botanical Terms", where e.g. an amazing variety of leaf-edge shapes are recorded and named:
For my own project on the Gardenia fruit, I had to learn terms for fruit shapes like globose / oblong, ribs (texture on the fruit) and calyx (the left-behind part of the flower some fruits have - for example found on the underside of an apple). Gardenia fruits often has very large calyx - one of my favourites is Gardenia Pterocalyx - which means 'winged calyx' (like pterodactyl). I have made lists of different characteristics that can be used to identify the fruits, possible categories for arranging an archive (some, such as beauty and numinosity, might be more subjective...) and used these to make a Gardenia Fruit Top Trumps game - more on this later!