Nature.net: Garden Spots

Natural History, Dec, 1998 by Robert (American businessman and engineer) Anderson

It's never too early to start thinking about what to grow in the spring, and the Internet has a seemingly infinite amount of information on plants. A Sierra Home software site (www.gardening.com) allows you to search a list of more than 1,500 plants for suitable candidates. It also has a searchable horticultural site directory with reviews. Plant Dictionary (www.hcs.ohiostate.edu/plants.html), maintained by Ohio State University, has a searchable database of information on 585 ornamental plants plus more than 1,100 images of plant-destroying insects and diseases.

If you live in an urban area, Urban Agriculture Notes (cityfarmer.org), maintained by a group in Vancouver, has lots of information about how to grow food in densely populated areas, including New York City. Plants for a Future (www.scs.leeds.ac.uk/pfaf/index.html) is a great site for exploring overlooked edible plants (such as the strawberry tree, hawthorn, and hardy yam), the many uses of plants, and a database of 7,000 plants together with extensive information on how to grow and use each of them.

Also of botanical interest is Kingdom IV-Plantae (www.mancol.edu/science/biology/ plants_new/intro/plantmen.html), which surveys the plant kingdom and includes an overview of plant classification and evolution. Also try Seeds of Life (versicolores.ca/seedsoflife/index.html), and be sure to check out, on the Voyage page, the biggest seed on earth from the coco fesse, a native palm of the Seychelles with a seed that weighs as much as forty pounds. The site Plants of the Machiguenga (montana.com/manu) was created by a neurologist who spent two months in eastern Peru searching for ethnobotanical headache remedies. And Arizona State University's Photosynthesis Center (photoscience.la.asu.edu/photosyn/default.html) is working to elucidate the steps (some of them occurring in just a few trillionths of a second) by which plants trap and store the sun's energy.

Robert Anderson is a freelance science writer based in Los Angeles.