another use for blogging software

Last fall I began a list­ing of plants that were new to the gar­den. I used it to track things like a plant’s com­mon and sci­en­tific names, what size of plant I put in the ground, where I planted it, when I planted it, along with mis­cel­la­neous notes. At first I used Microsoft Excel to main­tain my spread­sheet of plants, and it worked great in a lot of ways.

The main prob­lem devel­oped because I divide my time at home between two dif­fer­ent com­put­ers, one in the main house, and the other back in my stu­dio. Because I share the machine in the front house with John, he’d often be on it when I wanted to make an entry for a new plant. I had sep­a­rate copies of my plant list on the front machine and the one in my stu­dio, and soon the two lists started to wan­der out of sync. Had I remem­bered to mail myself a copy of the updated file to update my other com­puter? Or had I remem­bered to enter the newest addi­tion to both spread­sheets? Things got messy fast.

One improve­ment would have been to share a file between my two machines on the home net­work. But because I don’t have the most reli­able wire­less avail­able I’m not always logged into the net­work on both machines. So shar­ing a file wouldn’t work all the time.

Then it occurred to me: Why not use the capa­bil­i­ties of this blog to main­tain my plant list? I use Word­Press soft­ware on my site to power this blog. A lot of peo­ple are using Word­Press soft­ware (not to be con­fused with blogs mounted at WordPress.com) to run their web­sites instead of using it to power a blog, and using the capa­bil­i­ties of the blog to main­tain a list seemed no more weird. The net result is that now I can log into my blog from any­where on earth and update my plant list.

At first I kept the list pri­vate, but now any­one can click the “plant list” tab below my header and take peek at my gar­den. Soon (and when I have some time) I’ll add images to the list­ing, and I’ll also have the abil­ity to link eas­ily to any post­ing that I might make about a plant. And at some point I’ll be adding the older gar­den plants to the list.

What have I given up with this arrange­ment? One thing I really liked about the old Excel spread­sheet was that I could sort infor­ma­tion in columns eas­ily, by sci­en­tific name, by loca­tion, by date planted–whatever I wanted to look at.

Word­Press allows you to cus­tomize the basic out-of-the-box pro­gram with a long and grow­ing menu of plu­g­ins. But there isn’t any plu­gin I’ve found yet that allows you to sort data in columns or rows sim­ply by click­ing on the header. (There used to be a plu­gin that did just that, but it wasn’t com­pat­i­ble with newer ver­sions of Word­Press.) If any­one knows of a plu­gin that does this, please let me know–It’d make my record-keeping a lot easier!

Of course, anyone’s wel­come to write me notes about the list. Are there plants you want to know more about? Or are there plants you want warn me about before they take over the gar­den? Or you could do a quick psy­cho­log­i­cal analy­sis of me by look­ing at what I choose to put in the ground. Like, what kind of per­son would plant a camel­lia and Cal­i­for­nia native plants? Is he a men­ace to society?

September 25 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: • | No Comments »

online plant databases compared: PlantFiles vs. Hortiplex

Imag­ine open­ing your mail­box and get­ting one of those seed cat­a­logs with no pic­tures and names you’ve never heard of before–something like the J.L. Hud­son, Seeds­man list­ings, for instance, which just hit my house a cou­ple days ago. With a lit­tle work you can find out at least some­thing about almost any plant you’re inter­ested in on the web. Often the results from a gen­eral search engine query are a mess to sort through, and I wanted to see if I could find out infor­ma­tion on gen­eral plants by test­ing out spe­cific data­bases that would have pre­dictable inter­faces and results.

I’ll look at more gen­eral resources like Wikipedia and the USDA’s Plants Data­base in the future, but for this lit­tle study I nar­rowed the data­bases to those avail­able at two of the big gar­den sites, the Plant­Files at Dave’s Gar­den and Hor­ti­plex at Gar­den­Web. Both Dave’s Gar­den and Gar­den­Web offer mem­ber­ships that give you var­i­ous priv­i­leges, though Dave’s Gar­den charges for their pre­mium ser­vices. Both sites let you look for infor­ma­tion in addi­tion to just plants, but to sim­plify this study I’ve lim­ited my scope to search­ing the plant databases.

As of last Fri­day, the press kit for Plant­Files had this background:

The Plant­Files is the world’s largest collaboratively-developed data­base of plants, cre­ated by real gar­den­ers from around the world. It is tar­geted toward seri­ous gar­den­ers and pro­fes­sion­als, but is easy enough for any­one to use. Cur­rently 162,130 plants are fea­tured along with images and notes; more are added each day. Sub­mis­sions are sub­ject to peer-review, with errors cor­rected by a team of edi­tors. Plant­Files is the fastest-growing fea­ture of DG, and is respon­si­ble for attract­ing more than half of all new subscribers.

On the same day the Hor­ti­plex page said it con­tains “101,133 records, 78,477 links, 50,744 taxa, 50,389 cul­ti­vars, 14,409 images/image links, and 1,651 ven­dor links.”

Side-by-side com­par­i­son: On one day (April 4, 2008) I looked up a col­lec­tion of plants in both data­bases, one data­base imme­di­ately after the other. I selected gen­eral plant names, names of spe­cific vari­eties, and nick­names for plants. My sam­ple was pretty small–16 queries in all–but I think the results give a good sense for what the data­bases offer. The results of what I found are listed in the table below.

Enter­ing queries: The search inter­faces behave a lit­tle dif­fer­ently. Plant­Files auto­mat­i­cally turns queries of more than word into key­words booleaned together with an “or” oper­a­tor. If you don’t want that to hap­pen, you can do an exact text search by plac­ing the words together within quote marks. That’s sim­i­lar to how Google and prob­a­bly most other search engines oper­ate, so if you’ve mas­tered that, you can search Plant­Files in the same way. All the multi-word searches in the table below for Plant­Files were entered in quotes except where noted.

Hor­ti­plex behaves dif­fer­ently. It auto­mat­i­cally assumes right-hand trun­ca­tion, so that a search for some­thing like “kale” (which I used below) will pull up var­i­ous kale plants, but it also will retrieve Heme­ro­cal­lis ‘Kalei­do­ma­nia’ because “kale” is how the word “Kalei­do­ma­nia” begins. I couldn’t find a way to defeat that “fea­ture,” either by using quotes alone, adding a space to the end of “kale,” or by adding a space and wrap­ping the whole thing between quotes. Maybe there’s a way but I couldn’t find it, and I couldn’t find any doc­u­men­ta­tion on how to search. This fea­ture isn’t a prob­lem all the time, but I’ve noted some of the gross results below.

Dave’s Gar­den PlantFiles Gar­den­Web Hortiplex
Petu­nia 244 hits

With sep­a­rate hits for the generic P. hybrida plus addi­tional hits for spe­cific cul­ti­vars and other plants that have “petu­nia” in their name.
Many hits with photos.

 43 hits

1 hit for genus; gar­den petu­nia vari­eties clus­tered together under P. hybrida; other hits for var­i­ous species–various petu­nias and plants that have “petu­nia” in their name. 11 hits with images or links to images.
Dou­ble Delight rose 0 hits using this exact string; 1 hit using string “rose dou­ble delight”; 14 hits using short­ened string “dou­ble delight”; 8092 hits when no quotes used around search string. The sin­gle hit for this exact cul­ti­var had 44 images. 1 hit

With image.
Sar­race­nia 152 hits

Includes species, forms of species, and many hybrids. Many hits with 1 or more photos.

 56 hits
Includes species, forms of species, and cul­ti­vars; 20 list­ings with photos.
Sar­race­nia purpurea 5 hits

Found the species, one form, one sub­species, and two vari­eties. Four of five hits with 1 or more pho­tos apiece.

 5 hits

Resulted in the type species plus four vari­eties, includ­ing two cul­ti­vars. Two hits with images and/or links to images.
Hinoki cypress 3 hits

Each with 1 or more images.

 2 hits

1 for species and 1 for cul­ti­var. 1 hit with 3 photos.
Dianella 10 hits

Includes 6 species plus 4 vari­eties or cul­ti­vars. 9 with 1 or more pictures.

 7 hits

1 for genus, 6 species. 1 with image.
Salvia divi­no­rum 1 hit

With 3 images.

 1 hit

With 1 image.
black-eyed susan 50 hits

Includes hits for sev­eral species, but the major­ity are for cul­ti­vars of Rud­beckia hirta. 34 hits with 1 or more pic­tures apiece.

 10 hits

2 for gen­era, 8 for species. 7 hits with pictures.
kale 93 hits

All exam­ples of kale, flow­er­ing kale, or other appro­pri­ate hits. 23 hits with images.

 18 hits

Included 3 groups of kale species, 5 kale species, 10 other hits that had text string “kale” though weren’t the veg­etable. 6 hits with images or links to images, only 1 of these for the vegetable.
tomato Mr Stripey 1 hit

With 3 photos.

 0 hits

Also tried “Tomato Mis­ter Stripey” but still no hits.
alpine straw­berry 9 hits

All hits for cul­ti­vars of 1 species. 6 hits with 1 or more photos.

 1 hit
mizuna 6 hits

Hits for 2 species, 3 vari­eties, 5 cul­ti­vars. 2 hits with 1 or more photos.

 1 hit
mus­cat grape 0 hits / 1 hit for “grape mus­cat” / 262 hits for “mus­cat grape” entered with­out quotes, with desired entry in the #2 position. 0 hits for “mus­cat grape” or “grape muscat”
let­tuce Nevada 1 hit 0 hits / only hit for gen­eral “let­tuce” search.
lemon­grass 0 hits as 1 word / 3 hits for “lemon grass,” includ­ing 2 hits with sev­eral photos. 1 hit / 1 addi­tional hit for “lemon grass,” the lat­ter with image.

What did I think? As you can see Plant­Files at Dave’s Gar­den pulled up the most results most of the time. If you’re look­ing for a spe­cific cul­ti­vated vari­ety, it’s the most likely to have what you’re look­ing for. I did notice that Hor­ti­plex does have a pretty decent sam­pling of rose vari­eties, though it didn’t find the vari­ety of let­tuce I was inter­ested in. Still, there are sure to be times you don’t want to sort through 244 dif­fer­ent petu­nia entries for gen­eral infor­ma­tion. The lack of plant name author­ity con­trol at both sites, at least for com­mon names, can cause spotty, incom­plete results of the sort you can see in the “lemon­grass” exam­ple above, where “lemond­grass” and “lemon grass” were con­sid­ered dif­fer­ent things. Some sort of fuzzy “did you mean instead?” search­ing and retrieval would be nice, but these are sites with­out the resources of Google.

The dis­plays in Plant­Files were fairly ran­dom, and those big sets of results some­times took a long time to make sense of. Multi-word searches seemed to gen­er­ally clus­ter at the top the results of your query in some sort of rel­e­vance order. Hor­ti­plex offers a much more ratio­nal dis­play of the results, list­ing the best matches at the top, and orga­niz­ing things by genus, then species, then vari­ety. Fam­i­lies, gen­era, species (includ­ing sub­species and vari­eties), grexes/groups, and cul­ti­vars are all dis­played in dif­fer­ent col­ors, so it’s easy to tell them apart.

Both sites offer ways for users to enter new plants, though Hortiplex’s method seemed less ele­gant. There’s a basic review of pro­pos­als for new plants before they go up on both sites. Both sites offer some basic sci­en­tific clas­si­fi­ca­tion infor­ma­tion that seemed pretty reli­able, how­ever there isn’t much of it–mainly infor­ma­tion like fam­ily, genus, and species. Beyond the infor­ma­tion on clas­si­fi­ca­tion, Plant­Files offers some basic generic cul­tural infor­ma­tion along the lines of plant size, har­di­ness, soil needs and prop­a­ga­tion meth­ods. Unfor­tu­nately many of the sup­posed hits on Hor­ti­plex are just links out to other sites, and I found that some of the links don’t go anywhere.

Once a plant is in the data­base, both sites offer ways for users to con­tribute infor­ma­tion and pho­tos. To see the images or com­ments required scrolling down in Plant­Files or click­ing on a link in Hor­ti­plex. I pre­ferred the scrolling method, though Plant­Files requires an addi­tional click when there are more than seven images. Both sites have knowl­edge­able users, so you’re likely to find good infor­ma­tion about at least some of the plants.

In the aes­thet­ics depart­ment, I’d say that both sites are…functional. You go to the sites for the infor­ma­tion, not for ideas on how to make you web page look hip.

At some point in the future I’ll take a look at some broad ency­clo­pe­dias and at more spe­cial­ized data­bases. I know that there’s a rich com­post heap of infor­ma­tion out there!

Just for fun, you can try out your own search com­par­isons using the lit­tle search forms below, cour­tesy of some basic HTML code that’s offered at each site.

Find your plant by search­ing Plant­Files:

-

Search the HortiPlex Plant Data­base:
(enter a com­mon or a botan­i­cal name)

Include all records

Only records with images

Only records with ven­dor links

Only records of botan­i­cal taxa

April 11 2008 | Categories: gardening | Tags: • • • • • | No Comments »