Botany Buddy

It has been a long time coming, much longer than this post, but we are starting to see the pieces of our online tools come to life.  I hearken back to the journey of creating the original iPhone app and remember the emotional roller coaster it was.  Despite all the memories relived and the stress of dealing with the developers and Apple, when it finally hit the store, it was like seeing a Magnolia bloom in spring oozing with pollen.  The people we have met as a result have been like the friends you make at a garden party or your trusted allies at the local nursery.  They have pollinated our flower and created the fruit that will produce that cluster of bright red seeds for the Cardinals to harvest and spread the flowers all around.

When we started the iPhone app and worked with the developer, we realized quickly that there was nothing natural about the technology at all, no matter how smooth they make the interface look.  We realized that to continue growing and for technology to work with nature it must act like nature, be built like nature and grow like nature.  The pieces and parts must be able to work together to grow the ecosystem as a whole.  Unfortunately since 1992, when the USDA started building the first database, technology for horticulture has been moving the wrong direction.  The medium has been used to store, organize, and dictate what nature is rather than grow the information like the plant kingdom, has grown itself.  As a result the information is fractured, isolated and has not been allowed to grow and become the knowledge it wants to become. 

We experienced the stifling complexities of this paradox before the iPhone app was ever complete, but were limited by the technology of the device.  As users started giving us feedback, we saw the limited use of the iPhone to ATT and the iPhone platform create the same separations as traditional horticulture information on other platforms.  Nature is made up of symbiotic relationships that are not limited by species let alone by the brand of your computer or phone, and we realized to meet the needs of gardeners, growers, and the horticulture industry as a whole we had use the whole world as our ecosystem, just like nature does.  So just as we ran from the USDA and turned to Linnaeus as the inspiration for our data structure, we have moved from the native applications to a web based platform that can grow as freely as the Internet has itself.

Gardens are about growing… plants, places, people, minds, and relationships.  For growth to happen you have to learn, which requires listening, communicating, adapting, and experiencing.  Using data structures and technological devices that prevent and stifle this growth, have kept the entire industry from being able to grow technologically as well as the plants in their gardens grow themselves.  When it comes to reference sources for horticulture, rather than treating them as a growing medium, technology has acted more like a pre emergent or pair of pruners to control the growth of information.  In the end it has prevented or limited the experiential activities necessary to grow and has turned gardening on the web to a collection on limitless libraries and opinions.  Other than prolific and wonderful discussions in social media little has been done to grow the industry as a whole through the use of the information.

Some who will read this have seen what we are up to in our cyber-greenhouse, and have watched us toiling in the soil, and even seen some of the seeds germinate.  Finally the seeds have all germinated, their roots are reaching the edge of the pots and are ready to be potted up.  Like those first liners going to the wholesale market, that is who we have been working with first to bring this to market, and for some of those larger nurseries who do it all, we are planting our flowers in their greenhouses as well.  Soon it will be spreading nation, continent and world-wide just like those seeds on the Magnolia.

Like nature itself, the technology is proving that it can grow symbiotically with all these different groups regardless of their individual environments and species.  It is working, just like all of those original experiments that came from Linnaeus and those little bitty peas.  It is working because instead of fighting and controlling nature we worked with it, embraced it and emulated it.  We are able to grow all of these different tools for all these different people, because like nature we have one life force driving everything we do for everyone in our garden, and have used nature’s structural models to make it all work together.

We are not ready to release our individual or education tools yet, if you sign up for news on our main site we will keep you posted.  If you are in the nursery or landscape industry and looking for ways to better communicate with, or education your clients, staff, and end users feel free to contact us, and I’ll gladly give you a tour or the cyber-greenhouse and show you what we are growing for you.

Twitter can wear me out sometimes.  I am a little to ADD to keep up with everything that is going on in all those different directions.  There are some wonderful people out there that I have gotten to know and I am a better person for it.  Let’s face it though, many of them are as fake as they come, especially when in the form of some tweet machine or corporate face.  The odd’s aren’t much different than in the world of touchable, seeable, smellable beings, but they are often more obvious, because it is easier to see behavior in print over a timeline than in a personal encounter.  Every once in awhile though you meet someone in the twitterverse that reminds you who you are and of your own timeline.

A few months ago I stumbled into one of those in @rainbowirisfarm.  It wasn’t anything I heard him say or do, but the few encounters I have take me deep into my roots unbeknown to him.  Rainbow Iris Farm is in a little known corner of the universe known as Bedford, Iowa.  You may be asking yourself how one can find the iris for the corn, and that can be hard.  However, also in Bedford is a little place called Lake of Three Fires.  There aren’t many big lakes in the land of tall corn, because it is just too damn flat to hold water.  This isn’t a big lake, but it had something even harder to find in the midwest.  It had a beach.

I grew up over the border in a little town in Northwest Missouri, and my parents split up at an early age.  Some of the fondest memories of times with my father involved two places…his rose garden, and Lake of Three Fires.  When my parents split up, it was during the gas crisis.  Mom got the Bug, and Dad got the MG.  At first I lived with my mom, and on visitation weekends with my dad, one of our favorite things to do was load up the MG and head to Bedford.  We would put down the roof and my brother would get the front seat because he was older.  I would sit in the back where there was no seat on the little flat space that the roof folded down into.  Sometimes I would even make a fort underneath the roof where I could nap out of the wind on the way home.

We knew the journey had begun, not when the roof came down, but when he popped in the Eagles Greatest Hits 8-track.   That giant orange toupee would start blowing in the wind with those giant silk collars and gold chains flapping to the wind in the same rhythm.  We new good times were ahead, including the drive.  When we would get to the lake, Dad always told us he couldn’t swim, but in reality it was just that the hair tape wouldn’t stay on in the water.  Decades later I can remember the sight of him on those trips vividly, but I can’t remember for the life of me what that lake looked like.  I can remember the rose garden vividly.  Every time I see @rainbowirisfarm in the timeline, I see that drive and even smell the Aramis like it was happening right then and there.  Then I go back down my own timeline and always end up in the rose garden.

With father’s day weekend coming up I will be going to the rose garden at Biltmore for a leisurely photo outing.  I recently did photo profiles of every rose in the place.  That was an even bigger journey through time than my twitter encounters.  Ominously missing from the collection is a certain Mr. Lincoln.  Rose gardeners will know what a travesty this is.  I started to wonder if the absence it was a nod to the South then I realized that Peace and Olympiad were missing too.  Maybe Mr. Vanderbilt just had something against symbols of democracy polluting his aristocracy.  Regardless,  I will go and inevitably get lost in the sights, smells and memories of times past.  I might even go all the way and put The Eagles on my iPod Touch.  They rightfully deserve a place there with Botany Buddy since my memories of them are much a part what has brought it about.   Now if I could just get just get that MG since I no longer need a truck.

As we anxiously await Apple’s approval of a major update,  I have definitely been lax on my blogging, tweeting and being  “network social”.  In part this is due to a major surge of activity on our web app, but also due to the wealth of photos that can be taken at this time of year.  With heavy fog in the mountains this morning, and a glitch with the database I thought I would take this down time to give you a preview of what is to come in the update.  We did have to make one adjustment after our first submittal in late May, but were able to resubmit the same day on the 2nd of June and hope to be approved soon.

700 new plants have been added to the database.  These additions come from our growing private collection, the University of Arizona Arboretum, as well as Oregon State University.  With this trio we have been able to capture a few more key items from the west.  Our headquarters in Asheville has been able to greatly expand our Eastern offerings, and with UA involved, we have been able to move into hundreds of tropical plants, cactus, and agave.

Three new advanced filters have also been added to the advanced search to make this happen.  Cactus and Succulent have been added as “Leaf Types”, and Rosette has been added as a “Growth Habit”.  This allows us to work with our existing format and bring these additional plants which might otherwise require a separate app.  This app will still be limited to trees and shrubs due to the number of plants required to adequately cover them.  We still feel that accuracy and quality have to be take priority over diversity.  We are seeing with other apps that it is still better to keep herbaceous and woody plants separate than try to do both in one app.  It just takes way too much space  and do them both justice without overloading the operating system or taking up all of the device memory.

5000 additional photos have been added to the app  bringing the total close to 10,000.  While many of these are for new species, a substantial portion are to provide more detailed botanical information.  Especially on the species level we are adding numerous photos of buds, leaf and flower structure, bark, and more to aid in identification during the down times of year.  Many of the varieties are moving from 3-5 photos to as many as 10-20.  This detailed morphological information has been a major request of educational users and well as naturalists trying to identify in the field.

Browsing within photos has been added to help navigate this extra content.  No longer will one have to go back to the plant profile to select a photo to look out.  Once a photo is opened, you will now be able to browse all of the photos within any plant profile using two new arrows at the top of the photo screen.  This becomes extremely useful when you are dealing with 10-20 photos for one plant.

Pinch and zoom has been added to all of the photos in the application.  Originally we left this out due to photo and total app size, but as users and Apple are becoming more accustomed to larger apps we have increased the file sizes with a goal of allowing you to zoom 3-4 times while retaining clarity.  Most photos that we take in house exceed a  24 x 36″ format so needless to say, we re-size them to maximize your device screen, memory and the speed of the operating system.  All of our full sized photos will eventually be available on our web based platform that we hope to have ready this summer.

One Touch Browse has been added to the search screens.  Many people have had difficulty searching by letter or name so now we have added a “Browse” button to all of the search screens that will load the entire library from A-Z.  Of course you will still be able to view the results by common or botanical name using the sort buttons at the top.  It can take about 30 seconds for this to load, but keep in mind the device is processing over 2000 results and almost 10,000 photos.  To let you know it is working you will notice an indicator that let’s you know it is sorting.

An A-Z Slide Bar has been added to all results screens to help you sort through the results.  As a simple browse generates 2000 results, you can imagine it would be cumbersome to slide the screen hundreds of times to get to the bottom.  You will now find an A-Z bar on the right hand slide of the screen that will allow the user to slide down the whole library rather than just what is on the page.  There are also letters on the bar so you can touch on just the letter you want to go to.  As someone who has opened all 30,000 screens on the app over ten times, this is one of my most used new additions.

A Library Update Interface has been created by our developer to allow me to add plants and make library edits at any time without having them to import the data.  This is a back house item that will allow me to directly add plants to the app database on a more regular basis.  It will also give me greater control over accuracy that can get shuffled with data imports.  We will still have to submit updates to Apple in batches and cannot add them directly to your device without their approval.  However, this will allow us to add things in smaller batches on a more frequent basis, making it much easier  to meet your needs on a timely basis.  In fact, we have already accumulated hundreds of plant profiles and thousands of photos since I submitted the last 700 plants to the developer.  As soon as Apple gives us a green light I will be diving into this new tool.

There are other minor changes you will find throughout the app.  Some of the photos have been rearranged for easier comparisons, some data updates have been made and other little geeky stuff.  Even since this update, we have received some nomenclature updates from the International Taxonomic Index System (ITIS).  This is the kind of stuff we created the back of house tool for.  As our regular readers know, we are committed to creating the best tools and information possible and as part of this update we will be able to provide it much faster.  In many ways, this feels like a completely new app to me, and it is hard to call it an update as it is more of a new version.  Regardless, after a year of building and using it, when I need information it is starting to feel like an old friend.

In the last three weeks I have been visited by about thirty friends from distant places dating back over thirty years.   Some of them I don’t even remember not knowing and even though I hadn’t seen some in five to ten years it seemed as though a single day had not passed.  Most have married or should have been allowed to, and some we here to see one get married.  About the only thing that was different was some of us were a little softer physically and mentally.  However none of us were any softer in our passions.  When you get a group of artists, musicians, chefs, designers, and gardeners together you know you are in for aesthetic overload.  I have to thank Michael and Anita for choosing Asheville as the location for their special day.  There couldn’t have been anyplace more appropriate for such a reunion.

It was definitely a spiritual time and this in particular is a spiritual time of year for me.  Lately I have been completely enthralled in my writing for the update, but I have also been rediscovering my camera.  Two days a week I have been spending in the field capturing what has probably been the best blooming season I have ever encountered.  This has allowed me to capture from bud to bloom to leaf and to seed hundreds of varieties of plants.  In the process it has reconnected me to the people who introduced me to some of the plants, and the people I introduced the plants to.  This has been a true rediscovery of myself and I can never thank enough the people that have allowed this happen, just like I can never thank enough the people who first made these introductions to me.  There is an old saying that it is bad luck to thank someone for giving you a plant, you just give them one back and give one to someone else.  Gardening is without a doubt about giving and bringing people together rather than thanking them and going on your way.  Things and people always seem to keep coming around like the seasons in a garden.

This spring has also allowed me to reconnect with people I have never met.  In my excursions  I have visited private and public gardens as well as nature herself.  I have even just cruised neighborhoods scoping out that one missing specimen.  Twenty years ago this is how I first honed my craft with mentors and friends like Duane Hoover of the Kaufmann Gardens and so many others.  However no one made me better understand my craft better than those I studied that came before me.  Tommy Church, George Kessler, Frank Lloyd Wright and John Brookes are some of my favorites, but nothing influenced me more than the biography of Fredrick Law Olmsted.  I had read books about his work, but this was the first one that was really about him.  It is no garden book.  It reads more like a Western novel about someone who eventually found his was in a garden, and he was always the first to admit that he was not a Landscape Architect, just a lover of the arts and the land.  As a product of the liberal arts myself, I always related to him the most.

This spring I have been spending two days a week scouring the grounds of The Biltmore Estate, camera in hand and brain in the clouds.  Like the kid I was learning my craft in the parks of Kessler, and finding my way in the gardens I was creating, it is like Olmsted and I are connecting again after all these years and no time has passed.  Along the way I continue to meet new people as they find me crawling out from under a plant, trying to get that perfect picture of the bark.  Every once in awhile when I look beyond the picturesque gardens and soak in the pastoral, I realize Olmsted put that there too and I continue to meet new plants.  There is no one more responsible for the introduction of some the worst invasive species to these mountains than Mr. Olmsted, but I have not doubt he loved the land as much as I do.

I am sure that if he knew then what we know now, he would have moved from defining sustainability as related to money, to creating things that are sustainable without it.  He saw the plants as a palet to fulfill the visions of his designs, strong in Architecture, but grounded in the patterns of nature.  They were like the books on a shelf or the art on a wall and he brought a greater appreciation of them to all of us.  He saw sustainability as a plan to care for the land buy using it to generate the money to pay for the art.  I am sure if he were alive today, he would see that the plants need to take care of the land so we don’t have to plunder it to pay for the gardens we create.  In the end, he made us more aware.  He just wasn’t aware of the consequences of his actions, but without them we would not have come to the awareness we have today.

As I near submission of the next update, I will not jinx things and thank Mr. Olmsted, Oregon State University or the University of Arizona, but I will be sure and give them some plants back.  Most importantly, I’ll be sure and share them with others, because plants and people definitely go together.  In the end, without growing together we will never learn together.

Where to start.  I am back from a pseudo fast from twitter and the blog for lent.  It was unofficial, but needed even though I did sneak in a few visits on feast days.  However, the thought of returning from the wilderness is very appropriate.  You all know I am prone to the nature side of things.  Yet this time has allowed me to get back to my urban and “cultivated” roots.  The vegetable garden is up to date, and I have been catching up on photos from more traditional plantings.  Besides working in the yard, I have been hanging out at the Biltmore and cruising neighborhoods to capture more cultivated plants while nature appropriately sleeps.

As for my writing, I have been fully focused on the web app and update for the iPhone.  That has been a journey to the wilderness as well.  Many know, we wanted to complete the database for the web app before updating the iPhone so that the two will work together.  Finally we have the first 120,000 plants names and family trees entered, and are moving on to populating the data.  As the programmers work on that, I am compiling more plants for the iPhone.  On top of all that, we are also starting on our third release that we hope to have ready by fall or winter.

An old friend of mine friend of mine once wrote a song called In the Garden.  In it they refer to “growing different kinds of mind.”   This time has harkened me back to this song often.  I know we are all obsessed with the plants that we grow, but if you are like me, it is really the mind that matters and keeps me gardening year after year.  As much as we run to the web to learn more, I have to think the can learn more in the garden.  The conversation that happens out there between nature, the dirt in your hands, and the thoughts in your head is far more enriching than most of the shouting and chatter that goes on in here.

I have no doubt that the relationships I have made online are real as well.  However, many are not, and this time off has made me even more determined to keep those relationships real.  I have always despised the automated twitter machines, but I cherish those of you who engage in honest conversation and have missed you greatly.  Needless to say I am glad to be back, but after this time of reflection I will also be sure to spend more time in the garden than I do in here.  After all, I will have far more to share here if I continue to grow my mind out there.

The Christian Science Monitor had a good article on the state of the nursery industry this week titled, “The nursery industry is facing tough times.”  It paints a pretty bleak picture for the last year and predicts the same for next year.  It is actually an extension of an article posted by the Oregon Nurseryman’s Association.  I would link them both at the bottom but ONA still doesn’t post on line so CSM you get it.  The just of it is that last year commercial growers showed a 17% decline and they are predicting the same again next year.  The growers they interview hold their chins up and say the industry will rebound, but that they will be the last ones, because the plants are the last thing to go in when construction comes back.  For an industry that rarely operates on a profit margin over ten percent things will have to change.  They say that the industry is completely dependent on the housing industry, but that isn’t the complete truth.

I have been in this industry my entire life.  I am a Missouri Certified Nurseryman, and worked in some sort of retail or wholesale nursery my entire career until 2004 When I moved to North Carolina.  My growing design career had led me to a company that was entirely landscape and maintenance focused with no retail or wholesale operation.  The company I came to work for was the biggest in the area, the work was supposed to endless, every house I saw upon arrival seemed to be north of 1 million dollars.  Beautiful mountains, lakes, rivers, and golf courses (if you think they are beautiful) where everywhere I turned.  Being right outside of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, this is also on of the most biodiverse areas in the world.  For a designer and gardener, this was and still is paradise.  I toured about twenty jobs in three states during my interviews and coming from the inner city I saw how I could be creatively reborn, and I was.

When we decided to take the position and move here it wasn’t about work though.  We already had roots in the area from my wifes past, and we had a two year old daughter at the time.  We had reached the point where we had to leave our beloved Hyde Park, but couldn’t stand the thought of becoming suburbanites, or crossing the state line to Kansas.  This was about being the kind of people we wanted to be and raising our daughter in that light.  We made sacrifices and I contend they were worth it.  However, I have to admit some sacrifices I did not see coming.  I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Mountain Laurels, Rhododendrons, and Azaleas at every turn.  I was probably intoxicated form the smell of the Galax as well.   I still am and always will be.

What I did not see was the storm that was coming.  In the Midwest you can see a storm coming from hours not miles away.  It’s flat there, so when you first see that front coming it is still in Nebraska.  You have time to secure your site and get out of the way.  Here things pop up from behind a mountain and your stuck.  Luckily I have never been one to look to the horizon.  I am always one to explore inside before I look out.  I am a bit introspective if you can’t tell.   As a designer I take after Frank Lloyd Wright.  I seek out the box and break it down creating as many different views inside until I lead the eye outside to the horizon and nature so we understand our role in it and reveal the greatness of it all.

Once here I had to do the same thing with my new work environment.  One of the first things that struck me was that with one of the largest landscape markets in the country there were relatively few nurseries.  Where did all these local earth loving gardeners shop?  Asheville is way too crunchy for them to shop at WalMart.  The next thing that struck me was that we didn’t do any work in town.  All of our clients were an hour, county, or state away?  I was a mid-towner.  I was used to driving by all my work on the way to and from the nursery.  I could schedule an appointment on every hour because all my customers were neighbors and new each other, not an hour apart.  It was an event for the entire block when I came around.

Finally after a few months it struck me that I had tons of work, but I had no customers.  I would meet these people get to “know” them and their space, but when it came time to see the plan they may not even show up.  We would send the plan to them or give it to the builder, and a signed contract and deposit would show-up for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Then it struck me that all of these beautiful houses, furnished to the hilt, were empty.  There was no one home…EVER.  Not only were the homes we were working on empty, but in someways our work had become empty too.  After knowing all of my clients closely suddenly I was lucky if I knew ten percent of them.

One of the reasons I always liked working in a nursery was that my customers could find me, but now I couldn’t find them.  I knew my customers and as part of their home I became part of their family.  Suddenly I had tons of work, but had no customers, and even the greatest of designs somehow lacked soul.  I have done a lot of market research this year and from 2002 to 2007 the amount of landscape services performed in this country jumped from 24.5-44.7 Billion dollars.  It almost doubled.  The number of people didn’t double, and we know that what everyone spent didn’t double because the nation saw wages shrink.  What did double (in some cases more than double) was property values.  The over inflation in the real estate market that fueled new construction was what was fueling this growth.  Almost the entire landscape industry shifted it’s focus to service this new market with deep pockets, and best of all (in some people’s minds) there were no customers to deal with.  It was supposed to be easy money, and all you had to do was grow your company to do the work.

It’s confession time now.  A little over two years into my new position here, I went to work for the other side.  I started a consulting company that designed and managed properties for a few of the most elite resort developments in the Southeast.  I got a unique inside look at what was feeding the growth on the other side.  One of my roles was to create management and financial plans to manage these properties down the road.  It was part of the collateral needed to get  the construction loans.  A big change coincided with this growth at the beginning of the decade that greatly effected how this all worked.

For the first time in our nations history, the banks that made the loans that drove this country ceased to hold them and the responsibility to guarantee them.  As a result a fundamental change in underwriting occurred.  Property values were no longer calculated for what they were worth, but for what they could be worth.  If you had the land, a landscape architect, and a good marketing package you could set the price, get the appraisal and get the loan.  The banks didn’t care, because they were only writing a five year balloon that they were going to collect the fees on and sell the loan in six months.  Even worse the government was giving out HUD agreements protecting the developers from the buyers if for some reason they didn’t deliver what they were selling.  Even at the lot buyer level, the eventual homeowner could get their lot home package for no money down and no payments for two years if they had the personal credit the developers could use to build a house.

When it came to building the developments it worked the same way.  It was on the backs of the contractors to go out and buy the equipment for these multi year-commitments, and if it meant they could get part of the windfall and not have to deal with all those pesky customers they were all for it.  In the end, everyone involved was living off the over inflated land, and as long as the cash kept coming to feed the machine they were all fine with it.  Something happened on the way to the bank though.  Suddenly there were way more million dollars houses than there were people that could afford them, and all those little investors who financed those home to make a fortune on in two years suddenly couldn’t pay the bank when there was no one to buy the house.  When the banks came to collect, they realized there was still no asphalt on the roads to get to the house, the pool the developer promised wasn’t there yet, and that golf course was still five years out.   There line of credit would expire and be dry before the golf course it was for was even built.  Foreclosures on the spec homes started to mount, the banks couldn’t sell the loans and property values plummeted.

Suddenly the same was true for the developers and bankers.  All of these over inflated construction loans were due on a five year turn around, and before the construction could be completed the properties were already worth less than the loans.  The lines of credit came to a halt, property sales stopped completely and developers that sold hundreds of lots the year before were lucky to sell three.  With the banks cutting off the credit, and the buyers nowhere to be found, it was over.

The house of cards was collapsing, but to make that house of cards look strong people kept spending.  The contractors kept going even thought the developers couldn’t pay.  As payables mounted to 90, 120 days or more, the companies would finance them to service the debt on that equipment.  If they could just keep going and make the developers look strong someone would finance it,  or they could slap liens on teh properties and when the bank sorted it out they would get paid.   The problem was, the banks held the first mortgage, and since the properties weren’t worth the note, the liens didn’t get paid because the banks were in line first.

In all of this,  the only one left holding the bill is the contractors and the few homeowners that didn’t buy their homes in an LLC.  so they could walk away.  Oddly enough the ones stuck with the bill are the only ones that could have walked away, but chose to stay.  In the next three years 1.5 Trillion dollars in commercial loans are coming due on properties that aren’t worth what those notes are for, and this isn’t over yet.

Our industry sold it’s soul, or so it seems.  The thing is, our soul never left us, we just left it and we have to find it again.  There are those that didn’t get sucked in.  They stayed craftsman before contractor and realized to be a craftsman you have to have someone to craft a piece of art for.  We have seen down turns before in the 80’s and early 90’s, again after September 11, and this industry grew out of the great depression.  In those times though, the industry didn’t invest in what collapsed.  We didn’t finance the stock market, the dot com boom, or Osama Bin Laden. The difference this time is we bought in and got left holding the tab.   In times like this people find their homes and gardeners are born.  The jobs will be smaller, but there will be more of them.  The customers will not have as much money, but they will value our work more.  This industry was built on relationships, and going back to that is the only way it will come back.  We have to find what made us who we are in our souls.

Landscape companies will have to change, some will go, and many new ones will emerge.  The work is still there and is not going away.  The yards need mowed, the trees need trimmed, the house needs shade, and in more and more cases landscapes have become a structural part of construction.  Most importantly, more people are finding their homes and garden as something more than where they park at night.  In some way the industry got what they wanted which was less customers.  However I have to think that everyone is really like me and what they love about what they do is the customer.  If this is true the industry will be fine, but we have to be honest with ourselves that we are not victims of the housing industry, because we are in the home industry.  We just forgot where our home was.

More from the CSM:  http://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Gardening/2010/0219/The-nursery-industry-is-facing-tough-times

As yesterday would have been the 201st birthday of Charles Darwin I found it overly ironic that all I saw on the news was a barrage of people declaring that global warming was a farce because it had snowed outside. I have to admit that I am starting to find the snows I have missed from my youth a bit annoying now. However it hasn’t effected me enough to start denying reality and the evidence of real science.  I may be delirious from cabin fever and the total loss of routine from an ad-hoc school schedule, but it is not about to lead to the closing of this American mind.

Had it not been for the steady drumbeat of an old friend’s facebook status, Chuck-D Day might have slipped by me completely.  This friend is someone I new well in my youth.  For many years as children we spent every daylight hour walking up an down our town’s railroad tracks and creeks collecting turtles, snakes, frogs, salamanders and any other little critter we could get to ride home in our pockets.  Of course we evolved over time, and got smart enough to carry buckets and boxes.  At one point we even moved up to traps and converted a neighbor’s walk in aviary into an all out zoo.  This particular friend is now a Herpetologist and was leading a read-a-thon in which they finished the Origin of Species in approximately 18 hours.  (I can only assume this was faster than the last time.) As I watched the devolution of our politicians minds on TV his constant updates assured me that somewhere someone was actually evolving.

As for my own celebration, it was going on in my head all day.  As I spent all day listening to the talking heads knowing full well they were incapable of thinking,  I was thinking about how I became most aware of global warming through the spread of invasive species.   Over the years I wasn’t always aware of either problem, it took a move to a different climate to make me see how differently things react under the slightest change.  It became even more evident when I began working across the 3 distinct zones from North Georgia to Virgina that I could see how differently species adapt and react to different ecosystems.  Hybrid Burning Bush and Barberry that for years no one would have imagined spreading are not only growing from seed, but they are adapting and moving into climates that normally would have been to cold for their seed to survive.

When I hear people talk of climate chance, I always hear about it’s effect on water, and people.  How the oceans will flood the cities, rivers will run dry, and other factors that we see directly related to our needs as humans is all that seems to matter.  The only time I hear plants discussed is in how trees can offset carbon so we can create more.  Unfortunately I hear more talk about whether the change exists in the first place, than what we can to do prevent it.  However, more than fighting of global warming plants can help us see and understand it.

In some respects plants are the antithesis of humans.  Plants adapt and get stronger every year and can live several of our lifetimes, but they create a new generation and pass on those traits every year.  When winters were consistent invasive species were easier to keep in check.  The annual minimum temperatures used to keep the non-native seeds in check year after year.  As winters have gradually warmed, those seeds have have adapted and become more cold tolerant as those few extra degrees have allowed them to survive.  Now they can handle the extreme conditions that now occur once every five years instead of annually.  We on the other hand have not adapted.  Burning Bush that used to be contained to areas near it’s cousins in Georgia are now making their way up the coast to New York.  Princess Trees, Barberry, Butterfly Bush, English Ivy, and many more are making that same journey.  In less than a generation of our lifetime, these species have adapted to the climate change and produced dozens more generations while we are still arguing over whether it even exists.

As humans we are different from plants.  We may live for decades but usually only reproduce during a short window of that time and in small numbers.   While we do physically evolve generationally, we usually reproduce at a peak moment and then actually become weaker for the next two thirds of our life.  Plants and trees that can live hundreds of years get stronger and reproduce every year until that last year of their life when they actually produce the most seed.  Where we differ is in that we have minds that can evolve way beyond our physical bodies.  However, unlike a tree whose wood gets harder with age and ease, we have to work and use our minds to keep them growing even as it gets harder.  If we don’t do this, collectively as a society we can actually get weaker and devolve.  The more we separate into individual pockets of though and deny the science that exists in nature around us the weaker we actually become as a species.  Too often because of our self awareness we lose the awareness of the world around us and slow the evolution of our collective conscience.

In the United States we track plant hardiness and nativity with the USDA system for for classifying plant hardiness known as the USDA Zones.  The system is based on a ranges of temperatures, recorded temperatures by areas, and the minimum temperatures those plants can supposedly take.  The system isn’t based on where these plants should grow, but where they could grow.  It also only covers minimum temperatures and not maximums.  Even more odd, this “could” focus is based on how we can use plants to alter the environment through a commercial view not how to protect and preserve it.  This is from the Department of AGRICULTURE though, not the Environmental Protection Agency.  Throughout the world these systems vary, but an emerging and evolving trend throughout the world does not start with temperatures, it start with plants.  Aerial photography is used to map where the species that form the canopy are, and the undergrowth can be determined by combining that and other data; yet another Copernican shift in the right direction.  People are actually using plants to gain perspective rather than trying to fit them into their own perspectives and learning more about themselves and the world in the end.

Unlike trees, if our minds continue to grow after reproduction we cannot continue to pass it on year after year through our seed.  Even what we do pass on isn’t the content of thought, only the ability.  We can only continue our evolution as a species through education.   The strongest ideas aren’t the ones that are said the most often, screamed the loudest or that have the most money to advertise them.  They are the ones that come from listening, hearing, and collectively evolving with the world around us.  Our evolution as a species is dependent the recognition of our role in the community of species, listening to each other within our species, and admitting that trying to be the strongest being isn’t necessarily in our nature as a species, and doesn’t make us the fittest species.   As a species we can learn a lot from the trees around us, but the message we should learn isn’t to reproduce like the Duggars.  It is that the world is changing, and for us to become the fittest species possible we have to continue to evolve mentally every year, even after our body ceases to evolve.  The lesson is that our seeds are seeds of thought, and without them our minds cannot grow and neither can our species as a whole.

It is funny how we all develop.  I probably could have guessed that my friend leading the read-a-thon would grow up to be a turtle hugger.  As for me, while I was in horticulture at a young age, the technology I work in now was still in the form of a punch card and we couldn’t have seen this coming.  There was a third member of or 9-10 year old research team, and I don’t think I wouldn’t have guessed the future for  him either.  He is writing his dissertation on the effects of invasive species on soil fertility in the upper Midwest.  However, as kids nature planted seeds in our minds, and as we moved to different climates those seeds evolved with the world around us.  I guess our evolution is proof that passion can evolve into thought and doesn’t have to lead to the death or denial of it.  When I look at how we’ve grown, it is reassurance to me that for us to remain the “fittest” species we must continue to evolve our minds and realize that we are part of a community of species.  Likewise, by denying evolution, including climate change, we deny our role in the community of species, weaken our collective mind and species as a whole, and  jeopardize the species Earth as we know it.  How this all came about isn’t what is important, but acknowledgement that it exists and our role in it is vital to our development as a species and to the survival of the world as we know it.

I am still having a hard time taking off running with the blog since Christmas, but with the ground wet and nothing but ice and snow for a month, I couldn’t run if I wanted to.  Normally at this time I would be out prepping beds, putting up trellises for my peas, and digging trenches for my potatoes.  Instead I have been trapped inside by the weather and the year I hoped to be a quick return to the garden after the rains of last summer is anything but.  Instead, I am in the  midst of  a writing binge on the new app similar to the one I was on last summer when I started writing our 1st app.  For a gardener with a philosophy degree this is about as challenging to your sense of reality as your first introduction to Kant’s Epistemology.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Kant, the basic principle is that the meaning or reality of the things you encounter is not found in the things themselves, but is determined by the filters through which you perceive them.  Put simply, the meaning of an object is relative to the person assigning the meaning; not intrinsically embedded in the object being perceived.  In Philosophy circles this principle is commonly known as “The Copernican Revolution”.  To self-centered beings who perceive the world in how it relates to themselves, it only seems logical that other beings meaning would be centered in the being itself.  In Kant’s day this was as big of a change to most people as Copernicus’ claim that the world was round.

Many people don’t realize that Copernicus’ shift to viewing the world as round was Earth shaking enough to cause the start of the crusades and a complete reversal in the interpretation of the view of the Bible to being the “word” as in story to “Word” as in literal.  Hundreds years later, Kant’s view has unknowingly been adopted in countless ways, and  is viewed as the ethical foundation for capitalism, partisan politics, some religions and even some science.  This is actualized in the view that there is no man made global warming because man is nature.  In some cases it is even taken to the level that our self-centric role in the world is even divinely destined so anything done against another must be justified or forgiven.

Every spring I reach this point of reflection and introspection, and it seems to be directly related to the impending rush to make that first planting deadline of the pea.  The pea of course has similar significance in that it is the first plant ever scientifically bred and led to the proof and eventual discovery of the gene.  Little did Mendel know that his discovery and notion of genetic adaptation would lead to the concept of evolution generations later.  Hundreds of years later, those first discoveries made by a monk and his peas have led to an entire industry and way of life in which nature is now viewed by more people thorough an agricultural or horticultural lens than one seeking nature itself.  Nature is viewed by many as a means to an end for personal need and it’s meaning is derived more in how it relates to them, than the meaning it might have in itself.  Somehow, through the evolution of our thought, we have managed to take the nature out of nature.

I love Kant.   Maybe because in college Father Brady used to insist we called him CAN’T, and my love was out of spite.  Brady’s insistence was not because his shift of reality was away from an intrinsic selves to one self, but because if he was going to make a shift he should have made it toward God.  You could say father Brady was an “Old School” Jesuit…from the days when they carried swords instead of pens.  Regardless of my love for Kant, it doesn’t mean he was entirely right.  In fact my love is from where he made me realize that something was wrong.  He was right in seeing the relativeness, but wrong for denying the other selves, and in turn relationships between them.  I don’t think any of us are always right, because as beings with conscience and free will we have to be capable of wrong.  That is why we have to give up our righteousness and strive for good.  After all, the meaning of Philosophy is the love of knowledge,  not Knowledge by itself.

The thing with Kant’s Copernican Revolutions is that in determining which side of reality holds the meaning, we by default recognize meaning is intrinsic to both sides.  As I watch the world turn in my mind, and I plant my peas one seed at a time, I will undoubtedly be thinking of all the Copernican Revolutions happening right now.  The shift to organic gardening, the hopeful return to more localized markets, the return of our economy to making real goods instead of fake money, our roles as citizens in our country and as citizens of the world are all shifts as big as those caused by four little peas planted by a monk hundreds of years ago.  Our view back to nature having nature may even be as big as realizing the world isn’t flat.  Not to ramble, but these are the musings that made an old friend coin the lyric “In the garden growing different kind of mind”.

Regardless of what you see as important, the one thing these transformations all have in common is the recognition that our view of reality is changing once again.  As the forces of nature respond to our treatment of it, and people respond the polarizing views of each other, we are starting to realize that everything and everyone does have an  intrinsic meaning and they responding to each others’ self-centered views of them.  As I watch the bloggers here, people in the gardening industry and in the social networks on line,  I see the same things.  I see people trying to find their way in thought as well as their careers.  I see my friends in print finding the same uncertainty as those in real estate, and I see a widening gap between the masses of those struggling to choose the “right” side to follow even though both sides are lost and suffering.

Through all this I still see those finding a new way, like that next generation of pea sprouting from a seed.  I see those using technology to enhance the use of their writing instead of to compete with their writing.  I see people using both to bring people together to educate and solve problems.  Amongst all those struggling to use these new tools to shout the loudest and most often, as though there is something to win, I am starting to see new species emerge with a steady sturdy growth.   These people aren’t trying to win a battle of the fittest.  They are growing and creating their own Copernican Revolution in which the meaning isn’t in who or which, but in how:  how we move forward together, how we effect each other, and how we can bring out the meaning in each other to embrace the meaning of us all.

This is a new generation not founded in who’s reality is right, but what is the best way forward.  The new reality requires finding the meaning in each other, embracing the symbiotic relationships intrinsic to our nature, throwing away the notion of right, and trying to do what is good.  That little pea that seemingly sprouts out of nowhere in March and grows ever so slowly until it explodes with abundance and sweetness in June isn’t moving slowly because the lettuce is better.  It is taking it’s time and giving some nitrogen to the soil on it’s way.  It is letting the bees take as much pollen as they can.  In return the bees are pollinating even more, and if we don’t treat that mildew on the leaves the bees will pollinate a bumper crop because we didn’t kill them with chemicals.  If we look for the meaning in relationships with each other instead of in ourselves we will see that this revolution won’t require wars, because the great change will be ending the wars we create with one another and against the world we live in.  What is right will become seeking good, and that’s not so bad.

Now,  if you are not under ten inches of snow get our there and grow some mind.

This post isn’t filled with garden, horticulture, or botany related info and tips, but it is related to websites on these topics.  I am kind of new to the blogging thing, and the whole blog, tweet, push to Facebook and spread the love routine can get a little cumbersome to me.   After all my real job is to write and create our next products not blog.  However,  blogging let’s me make the connections I used to make when I was doing one on one retail, and design/build work.  I still need that connection and hope I provide something to those I interact with and don’t just turn into a hermit preaching from the side of a mountain.

Keeping up with all this stuff and the people I need and want to can be difficult.  In the old days it was my DayRunner and legal pad that kept me focused and connected.  Today it is my Google Reader and Opera Browser that fill these needs.  The reader lets me know what you are doing and the speed dial on Opera allows me to make sure I make my rounds through the neighborhoods.  The system allows me to catch and follow other blogs without having to track them down.  It saves me time getting the information passed where I want it to go, and it allows me to weed the out junk.  I am sure some of you savvy folks have even better systems, but for me this was a big step from the legal pad and a list of bookmarks in my browser.

This process has taken me from needing all day to keep up to making my rounds a couple times a day.  It has allowed me to get back to the work that I need to do. Now that I am back to research and writing I have a new techno-overload to deal with.  I put a lot of work and research into every plant we profile.  I have the standard books. I have a few international and nations resources I always verify with, but I like my references to be four and five sources deep, even for the most minute details.  This means I Google…..and Google and Google and Google until I get Googly eyed.  My strategy is start with the plant name then go to regional, local and family specific sources beyond the gold standards to the trail blazes and make sure it all “Jives”.

The thing that makes Google great for this is the simplicity, but that is also what makes it so bad. Everyone knows that Google is managed by keywords and hits.  This is especially true of marketers and people who are out to make a buck instead of feed the head.  Wikipedia, a certain popular garden site, some crappy thing called FLOWERS, and several other sites have really capitalized on this.  They have basically gone out and scraped the USDA and created entries for every plant in their data base and posted the name with absolutely no useful knowledge about them.  In some cases they even ask you to give them the info.  Then they set up a “robot” to hit their site over and over until it rises to the top.

This makes their sites easy to find, but all you find when you get there is the name of the plant, the USDA code, fields for info about the plant that are empty, and a tons of adds most that aren’t even for garden products.  The worst part is that since these sites are often wrong right down to the names, the bad information just gets perpetuated.  To find real knowledge you have to go four and five pages deep, track down specific groups and develop your own system of bookmarking that isn’t far removed from using a legal pad. This begs my question…Where’s my Google Blocker?  Why can’t I block certain sites from coming up when I do a search.   Google doesn’t make any money off the search.  They only make money on the pay per click adds which these sites aren’t using or paying for anyway.  Better yet, why don’t they let searchers rate the sites in addition to the ranking Google gives them that is based on the keyword search.

There is some fabulous research and writing out there, and there are some great sites, but they are buried so far under the compost pile that for good botanical info you have to dig a trench for potatoes not just sow some seeds.  I don’t need to list the bad ones…Google already does that and you can’t miss them with a simple botanical name search.  As for Wikipedia, while there is some great content and photos there, the canned format is loaded with improper names and taxonomic code from their initial data import.  As a result when peopel add great photos and info they are often adding it to already incorrect data.  Even worse, people are now recycling Wikipedia (because it’s free), just like Wikipedia recycled the incorrect plant names at USDA and exasperating these problems.

I could do a whole blog on some great University sites, especially in the US, and that is where the best info for the states is, but for now I am going to give you a few that aren’t tied to schools.  These or other private individuals and collaborations that are doing the wikithing, but doing it right.  These people trying to sell their input and knowledge or even just giving it away because they see the need.  They truly want to educate and not  sell you a bunch of junk you don’t need.  In the meantime if you know of a Google blocker…..PLEASE let me know.

TrekNature This is a combo Flickr meets Wiki but is saturated with educators, researchers, and photographers.

CactiGuide.Com This is a little more primitive, but very comprehensive.  The nomenclature needs some verification but is easily tracked down.

Mushroom Observer This is one of my new favorite hangouts and some of the most comprehensive and accurate info out there.

World Wide Wattle One of the largest Genus out there does deserve it’s own site and these guys prove why.

Like I said these are just a few but they are setting a great model.  They are ones that you have to dig deep to find, but should be right at the top.

It’s an age old question that can apply to many things.  Names are something we take for granted, but in reality they are the fundamental basis of all communications.  When we think of names we think of what we call one another, our pets, our children and our places.  In reality though ever word in every language is in essence a name.  Even a verb is the name for an action that takes many words to explain, that is why they all have definitions.  Imagine trying to give someone directions without a name for the action of “turn”.  Most importantly though, we use names to explain relations.  First names, last names, family trees, nationalities, and the names for the relations between these things are what derive and keep order in our world.  Even further they are the signposts to how we navigate and determine our possible impact on and place in the world. Names of course vary among languages and regions.   Different words (names) are used to describe the same thing in different languages and locations.  In the end, regardless of differences in language, the objects and actions being described by their name can be recognized for what they are and the variations in language can be translated.

The scenario where this doesn’t work is in living beings.  Verbs can vary in how they are performed, but that can be described with adverbs.  Physical objects like rocks or furniture can vary in visible traits or molecular makeup, but that variations are qualified with adjectives to help further describe the object.  Even these can easily be recognized visually and translated between languages and cultures because the “name” is essentially the same.

Where absolute accuracy is essential and qualifying additives cannot do justice to a name is when it comes to living beings.  When it comes to people, accuracy doesn’t seem to be such a problem because we are all unique and have a free will.  We will always act individually even within a community and the genetic heritage of our name has limited capabilities in determining or predicting how we will act.  People can even share the same names, but be easily qualified with adjectives or descriptors because every human is distinct.  With people and even domesticated animals, the genetic code may vary slightly within our species, but our wills, personalities, relationships and souls make us all easily discernible from one another.

With other less discernible species such as grasses, lichens, trees, fish, birds and non-domesticated animals the species may be discernible as a whole but the identity of individuals within the species is much less clear.  More importantly the collective impact or necessity of the species has an even greater effect on the world and nature as a whole.  Names of these species describe a collective whose members act on a collective instinct (or possibly conscience) instead of individual free wills.  In the end these names represents more than the one.  They give insight and understanding into the collective nature and cultural background of the species as a whole.

To answer the the title question:  Everything about and everything something and what it impacts is in a name.  A good name captures both the essence and esse of what it describes.  It captures the traits of what makes the thing being described unique (essence) as well as the intrinsic presence that makes it identifiable for what it is (esse).   Where meaning gets lost is when variation occurs in the naming itself rather than the translation of the names.  In the plant world people work in both common and botanical names.  The botanical name is a Latin based name that is used not only to identify the plant, but also gives insight into the breeding and heritage that led to it’s creation.  It is is written in Latin to provide a universal language whose meaning will not be lost in translation world-wide.  This allows us to see what the species is, where it has come from genetically, and what it might do in nature or the situation we put it in.

Common names are regional and based on local peoples’ experiences with the plant rather than the culture and cultivation of the plant itself.  Common names are extremely descriptive, but subjective and should never be used when striving for accuracy of any kind. There is much debate about what people like to use, and whether the botanical name is important if you are not a professional horticulturist or botanist.  However, you really can’t know the plant well enough to responsibly plant in nature or a landscape without the information provided by an accurate botanical name.  Common names may tell what a plant has done, but cannot give sure insight of what it is capable of doing.  Accurate and exact botanical naming of all species (not just plants) is crucial the the protection of nature itself as well as understanding it.  Nothing has been more influential to the spread of invasive species and disease than improper naming that occurs in the commercialization of plants and the mis-education that improper naming provides.

Over the last fifteen years, with the rise of genetic testing, efforts have been underway world-wide to cleanup this mess, and bring order to this problem. The Integrated Taxonomic Information System is one of the efforts that has been working across borders and oceans to make this happen.  The ITIS is a collaborative effort of governments and  academic systems, that crosses borders and oceans, but is greatly limited by the inertia and limited funding of the respective institutions.  There are others that specialized even more into areas such as fungi, cacti, wattles, and regional ecosystems.  These groups have a passion and sense of urgency but don’t have cooperative and interconnected systems to make some of this possible.  This problem isn’t limited to the plant kingdom, it is pervasive in the animal kingdom as well, and both do relate to one another.

Most of the early misnaming has been created by the limitation of communications.  Most botanical naming was done long before the Internet was ever created and the commerce of species became a worldwide phenomenon long before there was a world-wide-web.  As a result duplicate species are being sold and shipped with different names throughout the world.  Even more damaging, multiple species are being distributed throughout the world with the same name, and this is where the greatest danger lyes.  People are shipping and using plants all over the world for uses they are not suited for or with potential impacts that they are totally unaware of.   What is in the name they are buying or selling is actually of another name.  The greatest responsibility  lyes in the breeders and distributors of these species to accurately identify what they are selling, and to accurately identify what they are breeding them from.  Unfortunately, until the system is completely cleaned up and connected this cannot be done.

Commercialization has not only led to the spread of misnamed species, but people are breeding new species and varieties from already misnamed species at rates ten times faster than the original species were discovered.  When we started Botany Buddy it was created to help communicate and educate between the “classes” (for lack of a better name) of gardeners.   The tools we are creating are meant to bring the same language to educators, botanists, growers, purveyors and gardeners in a way that is easily accessed and understood by all.  Our original iPhone app was created to educate, communicate, and identify information to the user and for the users to be able to communicate it to each other.  In the end it has communicated just as much to us.  With users in over twenty counties and on every continent we have communicated with botanists all over the world to help us design our new database and systems.

Just this week we finished proofing the final taxonomic database for the upcoming web based app.  With about 60,000 species ACCURATELY represented we can now add data, photos, and even more species to the database and know that we can truly represent the species’ family heritage.  When we started this our intent was to add a thousand or so trees at a time, and just build on the library we had in the original app every so often.  In the end we realized we needed to add the ones we have now into nature’s library and to create our own Dewey Decimal System to manage it the information in it.  As a result our final product will be a tool that has literally “thousands times” more information than our initial release and will be formatted to grow at any given moment and with more accuracy than any other resource I have found in existence.  This capability would be totally impossible if it were not for a name.

Personally I like to be a little incognito in my gardening circles.  Those who “know” me know not just my name, but my botanical name as well.  I would venture to say those who read this blog regularly are probably getting to know me on that level to some extent.  The other day I was at garden center and watched someone selling an ornamental grass.  This person did not know my botanical name.   The customer asked if the plant would spread by seed.  The sales person said, “No this is Kirk Alexander Maiden Grass and is a hybrid that was cultivated by a local designer years ago.”  I pointed across the highway to about a 1/4 mile long stretch of maiden grass growing in a ditch, and said, “That may be Kirk Alexander in the pot, but those are his parents over there and they didn’t arrive until after Kirk did.”  Needless to say they looked at me like I was nuts, but that is what is in a name. If we know where we come from we know where we might go.

People are all hybrids and we may be determined not to become our parents, but it in the end both the best and the worst of them tends to come out in us.  Obviously I get my verbosity from my father.  He always used to say “the mind cannot absorb more than the seat can endure”, so I will wrap this up.  This trait about me you could definitely predict if I had a botanical name.  Our naming task has taken far longer, more mental energy, and more patience and determination than almost anything I have ever done.  It is and has to be the foundation of everything we do going forward to really be a great reference.  I like superlatives, and this may be the most important and responsible work I have done in the last thirty years and hope will help the world for hundreds of years to come.  That is what is in a name.