What's this PlantLinks thing?PlantLinks is a largish project I started a little while ago to make web pages with useful information about individual plant species more easily available to gardeners. More often than not, search engines return a bunch of useless links in response to a plant name query - along with the good ones, of course. After being frustrated with this for a long time, I decided to see if I could do better. Of course I'll never be as good as Google at finding all the information on the web. But at least I can make sure that the links all go to resources that a gardener is likely to be looking for. I started the project by setting up a database to capture a basic level of botanical taxonomy (family, genus, species, and the first level of subspecies/variety/form), and links about these species from across the web. Then I went to some of my favorite sources of plant information on the internet, and harvested links to their plant pages. New species records are automatically created as web pages for those species are found. So the taxonomy database is being built up piece by piece, rather than imported all at once from a single source. Inevitably this method leads to errors in the database - misspellings, species no longer considered botanically correct, etc. Using various sources, as well as just my eyeballs, I'm trying to pick out inconsistencies and fix them as I go. I'd appreciate any help I can get - so let me know if you encounter a mistake. PlantLinks isn't yet terribly user-friendly. The best way to find things is to start from the top and click the link for the genus you're interested in, then find the species on the next page. You can try using the search - provided you type the name correctly, this will also get you to the page of interest. Taxonomical entities that are superseded by newer nomenclature are handled by synonyms defined in the database. These synonyms appear in italics — clicking the link takes you to the currently accepted species entry. For an example, see the page for Aster. In all taxonomical questions, my reference is GRIN. This puts some species is unfamiliar places. For example, Belamcanda chinensis is found under Iris domestica. But the synonym links will generally get you in the right place. I try to choose the sources of links carefully. Some are websites whose intent is primarily informational (for example, Dave's Garden PlantFiles, Floridata, and the BBC gardening section), while others are commercial. You'll find catalog pages - but only from companies who do a good job of illustrating and describing their plants. I welcome suggestions for more sources. This project is just underway. As time allows, I hope to add pages from many more quality sources to PlantLinks. Please write me with your suggestions and comments so I can make it more useful. Rob Link sourcesThe majority of the links featured on these pages point to the following websites:
American Penstemon Society | |||||||||||||||||||||||
