THE 2020 CENSUS … OF YOUR GARDEN!
A Do-it-Yourself Guide to Identifying, Cataloguing and Keeping Track of Your Plants
I participated in the 2020 census — did you? So why not conduct a census of your garden?
We bought our house in Raleigh, Wake County, North Carolina about 10 years ago this Fall, and with it front, back and side yards on a third of an acre. We inherited a yard dating back to the mid-1950’s consisting not just of lawns and plant beds, but old, well-established borders busy with plant life. It was not until the next Spring and Summer that it all started to grow out, with many kinds of vines, ground cover plants and strange (at least to me) looking shrubs sprouting to life. While trying to tame the growth and planting things of our own, I eventually wanted to know exactly what was growing on and in our land. I also wanted to record what I had planted in order to remember and better keep track of our plantings.
I embarked on researching the best way to go about creating an inventory, or census, of our garden plantings. I looked into some programs and apps which allow one to create a garden map and list plants. There are several out there on the internet if you just use search terms such as “garden planner” “garden map” and the like. No cost programs such as “Garden Planner Online,” “Plan-a-Garden,” and “Garden Visualiser” will pop up. A fellow gardener highly recommended the Garden Planner at jungseed.com. I also closely looked into a program at smartdraw.com which is a very elegant, professional grade diagramming and charting program for which a license must be purchased. I almost took the plunge but found the tech requirements a bit too daunting. I am a Microsoft Office Windows user with a SurfacePro laptop.
After all this, I concluded that what I really was searching for was something simple, easy to use, but which could be updated and maintained on my laptop so that I literally could carry it out to the garden and point out which plant was which. I had in my mind electronically keeping the equivalent of a paper notebook, but which I could revise as plants come and go, and also make care and maintenance notes for any plant or area of our yard.
So, here is the process by which I came to develop what I think is a user friendly, workable way of keeping track of everything in a garden. Although it involves my use of Microsoft friendly products, the same principles apply and are easily transferrable to Apple or other programs.
First, I found a survey map of our property and divided it into 15 hand-drawn plots which made the most sense to me. For example, our pollinator garden, which is busy with numerous plants, was Plot 1 and our front lawn with persimmon tree was Plot 11. I then scanned it and saved it on my computer. If you do not have a formal map of your property it is easy enough to draw one yourself, or some counties have property maps accessible online, for example Wake County, NC at City of Raleigh and Wake County iMAPS (raleighnc.gov). Overhead images are available via Google Maps satellite view. You just do not want the plots you draw to become too crowded as you will be inserting numbers within the plots, representing each plant that resides in that plot. See my map just below and here.
I then learned how to use Autodesk SketchBook
which turned out to be remarkably easy and is free to boot.
I created and saved 15 different documents on SketchBook, one for each of the 15 plots drawn on my map, and labeled them #1, #2, and so on.
I then drew the outline of the plot. You can use either a computer pen or stylet
or a mouse to draw.
I used both, depending, but usually preferred the pen.
Then came the challenging, yet fun, part of identifying the plants. How many times have you stuck a plastic plant tag in front of a new plant in your garden, only to have had it disappear whenever you much later bend over to remind yourself of the plant’s name? Identifying some of the plants was easy, but there was a combination of those previously planted by the prior owners, wild volunteers and those that I planted but whose names I could not recall — I referred to them as the “unknowns.” I primarily relied on smartphone apps to identify the “unknowns.” I tend to rely primarily on Google Lens, but other apps I have used include Plant Snap and iNaturalist, and of course there are more out there. On some of the more unfamiliar plants, I ended up having debates with myself over which image and name was the correct one, and sometimes admonishing myself that it was not really necessary to work my way down the entire taxonomic hierarchy of the plant. Eventually after a fair amount of bending over, taking pictures and online sleuthing, I came up with names for what I believe are all plants other than weeds growing in our yard. Of course, this is best done in Spring, Summer or early Fall when everything is grown out.
Once the plants in a plot were identified, I then typed them into a Word document under headings for each plot and assigned a number to each. I then drew the numbers into the plot, approximating where each plant was located. Here is an example of one of the plots, #1. All the plots can be viewed here.
This particular plot is busy with numbers as it is the pollinator garden, filled with many different and unusual types of pollinators. As an aside, many of these plants were picked up at the JC Raulston Arboretum in Raleigh which has a Plant Buggy in front of its visitor center where interesting and unusual plants can be found and purchased, typically for $5.00.
Here is a link to the Word document I prepared which lists all the plants in our yard. If you look at Plot 1 at the top of the document, you will see all the above plants listed, 1–19. Note: I recently pulled out plant #17 but will replace it on the list once another plant goes back into its place. Or, I could just erase on the SketchBook page numbers 18 and 19 and turn them into numbers 17 and 18.
The individual notes about various plants have been removed to avoid clutter, but here is one for the three gardenia plants in Plot 4 as an illustration:
Plot 4:
…
6 — Gardenia
- Prune to shape after Fall bloom
- Early Spring and Fall — add Epsom Salt/magnesium supplement
Pretty straight-forward, but that sums up what I think I need to do to keep our gardenias healthy and looking good, unless a spray comes to be needed to deal with a fungus. I have calendar entries on the 15th of each month in my Outlook calendar in which I list the various tasks to be done in the garden that month and they are set on an annual recurring basis so that they pop up each year. For example, the above note to prune my gardenia after the Fall bloom appears in my October 15th calendar entry and the magnesium supplement appears in my September 15th and April 15th entries.
By the end of this process, I discovered that I have more than 100 different types of plants growing in our yard, many of which naturally appeared over the years or were planted long ago by someone else. I think it gives a gardener a sense of place and a feeling of control and supervision of our immediate environment. At the very least though, as our garden lives and evolves, we can now keep track of and care for everything living thing, which we now know by name. If someone asks me the name of a plant, I just identify the plot, locate the number within the plot and then find that number on the list of plants.
Good luck with your garden census!
By Tom Packer, award winning, certified advanced trained gardener, citizen scientist, and longtime backyard farmer in North Carolina and Northern California. All this article’s content is that of Mr. Packer alone as an individual and not as a member of or on behalf of any organizations or groups with whom he is affiliated.
