If you google for most plants the first entry you get is usually to Wikipedia. Now, Wikipedia is a great site packed with information, but as far as plant entries go it’s also full of botanical jargon and glaringly short of practical information about how to actually grow a plant.
Other search results will return information from plant databases. All created by ‘experts’, although in my opinion the real gardening experts are those that actually grow the plants: gardeners.
Whilst these expert sites have good plant information very few of them give gardeners the chance to give feedback on the plants. There’s one site which lets the users post comments. Good. That’s one step towards Web 2.0 and something that is already available on the plantality plant database and will be expanded even further later.
But what the world really needs is a plant wiki aimed at gardeners. Now, there’s another gardeners network which has a plant wiki. They even claim to have 70,000 entries. That sounds fairly conclusive. Except that, if you look at what is actually there, all the entries (or at least, all those I’ve looked at) are empty.
All they appear to have done is found a definitive list of garden plants, and created an empty record for each one.
So, plantality will aim to build a best of breed plant wiki.
But, my wiki will be more than that. Most plant databases are very difficult to search. You can search by name, if you know what you want before you’ve searched for it. But, what about finding a plant for a particular season, or soil type, or habit.
For the plantality wiki plants will be divided into over 200 categories. You will be able to search on one or more of these categories. So you could, for instance, find a shrub with blue flowers for a sunny site, or a perennial with yellow flowers which attracts bees. Or any one of thousands of other combinations.
The database is still fairly empty, but you can take a look at the plant finder now.