Botany Buddy

We always talk about Botany Buddy being “A Growing Community,” but just what is a growing community?  As the programmers have been frantically trying to finish our first app., we have frantically tried to respond to their needs.  However as the excitement over the last couple months has been building about the Tree and Shrub Finder, something even more exciting growing in our own garden.  Botany Buddy Online is about to open the garden gate.  Botany Buddy will be the first and only community of its kind.  This community garden will be a place where politics, prejudices, and the competition of an industry will be left at the garden gate not to form an online community, but rather bring a community together online.  Users will come here not only find the tools they need to grow their gardens and garden industries, but most importantly they will be able to find each other.

The Botany Buddy community is divided into three distinct neighborhoods:  Home Gardeners, Professional Gardeners, and the Community Gardens.  All three have custom tools designed for each category’s needs and interests that are designed to bring Botany Buddies, their knowledge, and their experiences together.  The Home Gardeners and Professional Gardeners will all share similar tools, like interactive calendars, messaging systems, forums, task masters, and any of the applications and reference material created by Botany Buddy.  These applications will be designed to interact with their mobile companions, and their capabilities will be expanded online.  All of the tools that go with the applications will be tailored to the Home and Professional users individual needs.  They will also have additional tools that will help people find and communicate with other users of like interests and expertise as well as their Botany Buddies.

In the Community Garden there will be another series of tools and resources designed to bring our Home and Professional users together.  In all of the Botany Buddy communities there will be no direct solicitation of our users through adds, or spam.  Users can “Buddy-up” with whomever they like, and there will be tools in all of the communities to find and encounter other users with similar needs and interest.  An example of these tools would be the Find A Buddy function.  When a professional user joins they will fill out a user profile that will be incorporated into an application where users can search for other Botany Buddy users that specialize in areas of expertise and by region.  Professional Gardeners will not be be able to search for Home Gardeners to protect the privacy of their personal garden space.  Instead forums, calendars, group functions, and other features will provide a virtual playground for gardeners where they can meet and share their interests, stories, and expertise.  The goal of all of this is to grow a community of users to help each other grow and grow their connections.

The main ingredient to success in all community development is to find a common denominator that people of all beliefs and backgrounds have a common passion for and to leave all other biases at the door.  This is the same whether you are working on inner city redevelopment or trying to grow an online community.  The other key is that no one is selling a personal agenda and that there is a true spirit of cooperation to grow a common good.  Botany Buddies  are blessed in that we all share a love for gardens and nature.  We are blessed at Botany Buddy in that we don’t have to find that common denominator.  Our goals and efforts get to be focused on creating a community garden where people who already want to work together can have the space and tools they need to to grow together.

There are countless social networking sites out there that are gathering up as many people as they can find, but have no idea what to do for them or with them.  These places call themselves online communities, and this in not what we are.  Our members know what motivates them and what they want to do.  They just need a place and the tools to do it.  Botany Buddy is not an online community, but rather a community online.  Our community already exists it just needs a place to grow.  I have been in the landscape design industry for over twenty-five years.  For fifteen of that I have also been involved in community development.  This is one of the most exciting and rewarding efforts I have ever been involved in.  The community building outlook and approach are key to what makes Botany Buddy “A Growing Community”, but it is the generations of gardeners that have come before us and given our Buddies that common passion that have made this all possible.

I was speaking with the managing editor of a major gardening magazine about the Tree and Shrub Finder the other day.  The two of us go way back.  We cut our teeth together when I was an up a coming designer and she was managing photo shoots of stock photos for an up and coming magazine.  We were both reminiscing about how we had seen our industries evolve and somewhat devolve in the the last year.  She is in publishing, whose entire revenue model has been turned upside down.  Printed magazines can just no longer be financed with advertising when internet competition is market specific and cheaper.  I of course was in Landscape Design where the industry was surviving on massive real estate development for 70% of it’s income, just so it could continue to serve the other 90% of the customers.  In both situations, the industries had evolved into systems that were no longer financially sustainable.

When I started in this business I was working in a small garden center in rural Northwest Missouri.  I grew my roots bagging seed potatoes, displaying plants in the nursery and doing good old fashioned retail.  It was a simpler time for business but a very real time that was all about how we interacted with our customers.  Customers came to us because they could ask us questions.  If we didn’t have the answers we could grab a book and look them up.  Most days of the week the help in the store out numbered the customers five to one.  We didn’t have to overcharge to cover that.  Instead, we spent all week learning and preparing to make up the difference on the weekend when the tables were turned.  For the first fifteen years of my career it was about getting a fair price for a quality product and treating every customer equal.

Then something changed in the industry.  Just as agriculture was moving to mono-cropping and industrial farms,  the nursery industry started focusing on large commercial landscapes, buying tons of equipment and land, building large box stores and establishing massive growing operations.  Technologies and advancements can be a good thing, but building overhead that makes it impossible to serve your base customers is not.  The thing that has always separated small independent nurseries is the ability to make those personal connections.  Some still exist and we all do what we can to support them, but we all have times we can’t afford to and resort to the giant box vendor.  Just as the customers can’t always afford to support that kind of service the small retailers can’t afford to either.   They just can’t afford to have their help spending hours digging out answers, and the resources to find them can often cost as much as that employee’s weekly pay.

When we started conceptualizing Botany Buddy, we kept visualizing ourselves lost in the forest of a giant box retail nursery with no help to be found, and no way to find answers.  We have all been there, even me with a lifetime of experience.  Afraid to call our wives, and unable to find help, and if we could someone them they didn’t know anything but what they were told at the weekly sales meeting to sell us all the add-ons.  We thought about how we could help that lost soul in the giant box, and help the small retailer and independent landscaper reconnect with their clients and educate their staff.  That is what we created Botany Buddy for, to create a series of tools and resources that could overcome these hurdles and still be financially accessible to all.  With our soon to come online resources and our mobile applications we have found a way to retool the industry.

When I was talking with that editor she said like so many others, “I’m really not that technologically advanced,” but that everyone else in her office was really excited about what we were doing.  I have to admit, I am a techno junkie, but had not crossed over to Apple until it was time to proof the Tree and Shrub Finder.  I went out an got an iPod Touch just to run the app.  Once I had it in my hand, was out in the woods identifying trees, adding them to collections, and sending them to my wife, it took me back to my first pair of Felco pruners.  Nothing had ever felt so right in my hand, and it fit in my pocket.  This is the most powerful and useful tool I have ever owned as a gardener and professional, and combined with the growing online resources it has limitless possibilities.  Seeing people come together to get this done, and now use it,  I am seeing our original vision come to fruition.  We are retooling an industry, but more importantly reconnecting it to its people, creating a growing community, and growing with it.

As I watched the recent news of someone suing their college for the cost of tuition because they haven’t gotten a job, I cannot express how glad I am I went to college to get and education and not a job.  Not that a Philosophy Degree is the most marketable piece of paper, in the first place.  However, without my liberal arts education, I have know doubt I would not be able to do what I am doing today or the things that gotten me here.  This is a driving and omnipresent force behind the co-founders of Botany Buddy.

When we were approached to create Botany Buddy one of the motivating factors was being able to create something that could be used for education.  When it came time to put together our image library we made a conscious decision that would influence the direction of this company indefinitely.  There were plenty of retailers and corporate giants that we could have gone to in exchange for marketing their plants.  However, both of us being raised by college professors felt an inner obligation to partner with education.  We also felt it important that our images express the plants, not sell them.  That is why we partnered with Oregon State University and a percentage of all profits from the Botany Buddy Tree and Shrub Finder will be given to the horticulture department at Oregon State University.

In my years as a designer one of my favorite references has been the online resources at Oregon State University.  As often as I had used it, I really wanted a chance to give back.  One long phone call with its creator Pat Breen and I knew we had a connection.  A plant hound from the West Coast who had been carrying his camera for a lifetime of studying plants, and a designer on the East Coast who had spent his life working working with them had found each other through the the internet.  It didn’t get anymore Botany Buddy than this.  So a formative agreement was made to use this library to form our original data base.  The two guys who once were raised as faculty brats in small college town once again found themselves and their paths being formed by Academe.

Botany Buddy will be adding much more information and many plant libraries from commercial vendors as our community and resources grow.  One pledge that we have made is not accept money from vendors to promote their products to our home users.  We will have places in Botany Buddy Online where vendors and home gardeners can interact, but only people you will always have your personal garden space where advertising is not allowed.  In return for including a vendor’s plants or products all we will require (or will accept) is that our users can exchange their images freely with any Botany Buddy.

As a commitment to yet another school that has helped to form our growth, a percentage of the Tree and Shrub Finder will always go back to the Horticulture Department at Oregon State University.  One of my greatest professional joys has been getting to know Pat Breen through his photos, how they have changed, and how his cameras have changes over the years.  The way the photos are taken, and how they presented are both obviously done to educate the user and reveal the essence of each plant.  We have tried to uphold that in how we display them, and will continue to follow his lead as we add more images.

My father always told me you don’t get an education to get a job, you get an education to find out who you are, and to better understand others.  Botany Buddy products are all designed to help understand the plants, products, and people who use them.  We also want you to know why to use them or not to use them.  Our commitment to being a catalyst for education is equal to our commitment to support education with our rewards.

The Tree and Shrub Finder is the maiden voyage of Botany Buddy.  When I was first approached about building this app, it was meant to be another one of the hundreds of widgets going into the mobile application market.  Most mobile applications are fairly simple and are either documents that you read, a game that you play, or a tool that you use to perform a simple one or two question task.  Being the obsessive compulsive gardener I am, such moderation really wasn’t my style.  If we were going to do this, it had to be done right, it be packed with information, it had to solve lots of problems, and it had to be something you could bond with like a good pair of pruners, or your favorite kitchen gadget.  Most importantly though it had to be able to grow.  Not just help you grow, but also grow itself.

Most tree and shrub libraries are static and dated the day they are finished.  Plant books can weigh tens of pounds, are behind the new releases the day they are finished, don’t fit in your pocket and don’t hold up well in the rain.  There are several CD ROM’s on the market, but they can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars only to spend hundreds more on updates.  In both cases two of the biggest challenges are sharing the information with others, and the fact that they don’t interact with each other.  To overcome all these hurdles, this application had to be like  your favorite gardening tool and your best gardening friend in your pocket…a Botany Buddy.

So in the process of figuring our what we wanted to do with a (not so) simple tree and shrub library, we also found out what we wanted to do ourselves and essentially who we are.  Some common themes of the essence of gardening kept arising:  the sharing of knowledge, experiences, and information, and the ability to grow our garden (for us our product), grow our customers as gardeners, and grow the connections between them.  I once heard Michael Dirr say that dirt was the common denominator that could bring people of all different backgrounds and beliefs together and could break down all barriers for the sake of enjoying the beauty of a garden.  That really does sum up what I always wanted to be as a designer and a professional, the dirt.  As we move further from the dirt, spend more time together in cyberspace and less time together in the garden, we want Botany Buddy Buddy to be the cyberdirt that brings us all back together.

Botany Buddy is a Growing Community.

There really is no better way to describe it. It all started with three people scattered between the Pacific Northwest, the Southern Appalachians, and the heart of Texas.  All of them held crucial pieces of the puzzle, and held one main core value in common. That core value is that without communication, education, and interaction, information is worthless, but all together, they have the potential to change an industry, and change the world one garden at a time.  Millions of  people around the world are trying to live with nature, create their own spaces, and feed their families in the first industry known to man, and one of the largest in the world…growing.

In today’s changing world the sources of information are limitless.  From Bloggers, to print, all kinds of media, and old fashioned garden clubs information is passed and absorbed in more forms than ever and at faster speeds.   To stay on top of it all you have to be in more places and have more tools than one can possibly keep up with.  By the time you do get information by buying a book or CD ROM, it is usually outdated when a new variety of plant has been released or a more effective method of caring for it has been found.  Sometimes it seems as though the resources in our libraries change as often as the vegetable in our gardens.

When Botany Buddy first came about, I was approached to help design and build a mobile application for gardeners.  That app was the Tree and Shrub Finder.  Having been a gardener my whole life and designing landscapes for almost twenty years, I was fully aware of the needs and opportunities for home gardeners and professionals alike.  I also new that the greatest gift of gardening besides being connected with nature was being connected with other gardeners.  I have always been a book hound when it came to gardening, but the greatest lessons I have learned in gardening have come from the generations of gardeners before me.  Sometimes those lessons came from mentors, some from my customers, and sometimes they were from the guy selling produce on the side of the road.  No matter where those lessons came from the greatest impact on me has been from the gardening community as a whole.

That is why when Botany Buddy was created I wanted it to be more than a tool you kept in your pocket, but something that allowed people to connect to the gardening community as a whole.  One of the greatest challenges we face as gardeners is not having enough time to share with each other, or the expense of trying to do so.  As a designer nothing was more rewarding than the one on one time I could spend teaching and learning with my clients.  Nothing was more frustrating than trying to get information to them when I left.   In so many ways technology has brought the world closer together, but driven us apart as individuals.  That is why Botany Buddy was designed not just to be something you keep in your pocket, but something to bring us all together.

Welcome to our Growing Community