Come to think of it, I know just enough about plants that sometimes I have the reverse problem with fantasy novels: it niggles at my suspension of disbelief when a hopeful peasant lad hikes through a forest for days without noticing the trees.

Yeah, that's why I've made a concerted effort to learn more about the flora and fauna of the environments my characters wander through -- especially the natural historian, who bloody well ought to pay attention to that sort of thing.

re: "I remember the carrots" -- the conversational rhythm does work pretty well for me, and I'm familiar enough with carrots to have the visual (though even there, that's a semi-recent thing; before moving to California and attending a farmers' market regularly, "carrots" to me were the already-decapitated things in the grocery store, and so the greens would not have been in my mental image). I think it also helps that the lines are longer and could almost pass for iambic pentameter if I didn't look too closely, so they feel like a more recognizable form to me, and don't have the choppy feeling that shorter lines in free verse so often have.