I've found that getting your perception up makes a huge difference. I have two gear sets for botanist one of which is for actual botany the other for hamlet defence. The hamlet defence one is focused on gathering to compensate for the lost gathering due to weilding a broken lvl one tool. The actual botany gear is focused on perception. As an experiment I tried both sets for 4 hours each in nine ivies for a few days. I noticed I was getting a lot more hq spruce branches but the increase was lower than that for the resin/logs etc. Only tried it for three days so it could just have been luck that accounted for the different increases between the spruce and other drops but it's an absolute certainty that loading on as much perception as you can makes a big difference.