In my latest substack article, I talk through the process of tracking down an obscure plant from the point of view of a layman. This is all my hard won knowledge distilled down into an detective story/article. I hope it helps you with your own research into obscure plants
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Very enjoyable read. I enjoy tracking down citations from time to time.
I want to mention the Scholar subreddit
If there is an academic article that can’t be found for free online, or via jstor.org or Google scholar, a person can post in that subreddit in order to ask someone who has access via their employer to make you a copy. Almost every article I have requested, someone helped me by sending to me via private message after a request for help there.
(If you haven’t contributed to Wikipedia before, I hope sometimes when you are researching plants you will consider adding information to the encyclopedia!)
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Thank you, that’s useful advice and very encouraging 
We delve further in part 2, where we meet some of the lives that have entangled themselves in the pursuit of this specific plant (Argentina sumatrana):
We’re closing in on our plant suspect (Argentina sumatrana), hopefully you will continue to learn from my own experiences at tracking down rare plants by following a citation trail
One thing I wasnt sure of- why is this particular species of interest? A tropical montane species seems like it would be a bit of a pain to grow in the UK. Does it have especially good edible roots as well?
I’ll make this clearer in the final article, but my point is that we just don’t know if it has edible roots or not. The plant was chosen randomly from the list of more than 60 on the Kew Garden’s silverweed species list. We basically knew nothing about the plant apart from the region and preferred location. It might have great edible roots, who knows? It’s just one of almost 60 plants in this genus that has very little information.
Spoiler alert, even at the very end, we will still know nothing about the edibility. It’s no surprise really, there’s been so little research into this area (physically and literally).
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Hello,
I don’t know if it would be helpful for the articles you’re looking for but you can always try scihub. Its an online resource that you just put in the DOI or URL for the article. About 75% of the time I would say it has the article I’m looking for. The only times I would consistently not get an article is when its too new (under 1.5 years old) or too old (written before 1960s).
Thank you, I will check it out!
Some of the references I’ve tried to find during this series are so obscure they don’t have a DOI or URL. I’ve had to give up on those.
I forgot to post this here when I finished, but in this final post we finally tracked down the plant, photo and description: Citation Breadcrumbs, part 4 - by A. Potentilla