PlantFinder
"By early May we already accumulated 432,982 visits,"
says adult education coordinator Glenn Kopp of the Missouri Botanical
Garden’s website. No wonder. Gardeners can find comprehensive
information on more than 2,700 perennials, shrubs, vines, and trees that
grow or have been tested in the Kemper Center for Home Gardening’s
demonstration gardens. To access this information, go to the website
http://www.mobot.org,
click on "Gardening Help" to get to the PlantFinder. There plants may be
located by either common or botanical names. For those wishing to use
plant images for publications or in student projects, says Kopp, "we are
pleased to grant permission if they credit the images."
Kew Online
ePIC (electronic Plant Information Centre) is the name of
a new online information resource service released by Kew Gardens, UK.
From the website
http://www.kew.org/epic/ , it is currently possible to access
and search for plant information in the first 4 databases.
These include: the International Plant Names Index (IPNI), the product
of a collaboration between The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, The Harvard
University Herbaria, and the Australian National Herbarium, a database
of the names and associated basic bibliographical details of all seed
plants that is gradually being standardized and checked; bibliographic
data in the Kew Record of Taxonomic Literature; information about the
economic uses of plants in the Survey of Economic Plants of Arid and
SemiArid Lands; and the Living Collection of some 30,000 plant taxa.
In addition, the Kew Library Catalogue of some 145,000
individual records is available to a worldwide readership at
http://www.kew.org/library/catalogue.html.
Herbs Online
This site clusters information on the many types of
holistic health practices, holistic remedies for various ailments, along
with a directory of herbs. There are also abstracts on the latest herbal
research:
http://www.Holistic-Online.com.
HealthWorld Online
This is another site with information on various aspects of alternative
health care. To reach an encyclopedia of herbs and their uses, go to
Materia Medica at
http://www.healthy.net.
Keys Online
Gardeners use horticultural keys to determine the
identity of an unknown species. Horticultural keys are presented as a
series of alternative characteristics. Each time someone chooses between
traits such as "orbicular leaves" or "elliptical leaves," "glabrous
stems" or "pubescent stems," he narrows the possibilities. Finally, by
process of elimination, he can "key out" or identify the mystery plant.
In pre-computer days, one’s best bet was to find a work
by an expert on the genus in question and hope that it would include a
key to the various species. Now, there are online keys at the Cornell
University website. To identify a Viburnum species, What Viburnum is it?
provides a key:
http://www.hort.cornell.edu/vlb/key/index.html. To key out a
tree, Tree key for 50 trees,
http://cornell.edu/tree/trees/htm will help establish identity
in summer and winter.
Beauty you can count on
The Fibonacci Sequence is a mathematical progression in
which each digit is the sum of the previous two—1,1,2,3,5, 8, 13 and so
on. Recently, Plant Spirals, an exhibit of plants with growth spirals
that corresponds to two numbers of the Fibonacci Sequence was mounted at
the Church Exhibition Gallery of Smith College’s Botanic Garden’s Lyman
Plant House. Although the show closed on March 31, the stunning photos
of plants spiraling with geometric precision will stay online
indefinitely at
http://www.math.smith.edu/phyllo/expo.
