Botany Buddy

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.