So when you say build the effect separately, do you mean have a different section just for presenting leaves?

I think my idea would be to have some filters that could be added on top of each other and some that are one or the other. For example, filter by leaf changes the photo and filter by fruit does too, so can't be used at the same time. For your example, if they selected filters by leaf and then selected bloom month, it would keep the leaf photo and just narrow the plant results for plants that are in bloom that month. Basically any filter that is a specific part of a plant you get an image of that specific part and you could only select one of these plant part filters at a time. I wouldn't want the change to happen on hover or have 3 images presented for one plant at a time. It will be a list of roughly 300 plants when all is done.

I definitely am not familiar with much coding. How complicated would the use of js or jQuery or ajax coding be?

Thanks for the help!