Botanical Garden cooperation

Hi! Welcome to Plants.am, the plant and garden wiki. I hope you're as excited about the idea as we are.

The purpose of a Botanical Garden or Arboretum and that of this site overlap to a large degree. We want to help educate each other and the world about plants, study them, preserve them, propagate them and spread them. Many gardens specialize in natives, rare plants, Australian gardens, edibles, tropicals, cacti or a host of other types of plants. This site aims to have articles on every single garden/indoor/greenhouse/alpine house plant in the world, as well as every gardening topic imaginable. Eventually, the idea is to have this site answer virtually any question a visitor can have about a plant and how to grow it.

We need your help!! We'd love to start cooperating with gardens around the world to help this site grow. There are many ways your organization (or the individuals therein) can cooperate with this site to help it reach the rather lofty goal it has set for itself.

• Your experts, volunteers, and visitors can all be informed about how easy it is to edit pages on this site. Virtually all the pages have an "edit" tab on top, and information can be added and edited.
• Photos of plants in your collections can be uploaded. You do not have to release rights in order to do that, and would get full credit on the photo page. Plants photographed at different times of the year, macros of the flowers, leaves, etc are all needed.
• Articles in your newsletters, blog entries, comments on other peoples blogs, emails to colleagues, etc.
• Links from your websites or social networking sites, or anywhere else.

Just getting regular users on the site is as important as editing the site. Editing the site is not for everyone, and we don't want to scare off visitors who just want to read the information and try it out. That's the ultimate point of the site, after all. The more momentum that we can build, the faster the goal will become a reality.

Remember, we're not competing with Wikipedia - an article on Oranges here will tell you very different information than on Wikipedia. This site will explain how to grow it, the diseases and pests to watch out for, when it blooms/fruits, pollenation, how to propagate it, detail on the many varieties and cultivars, etc. Wikipedia will tell you in detail the history of the fruit and origin, uses of the fruit, production levels in different countries, economic value, acreage, references in pop culture, etc. Each has its value, depending on what information you are hunting for. Plant article here should all be linked to the corresponding Wikipedia article, and hopefully, vice-versa.

If you have any questions or ideas for cooperation, please let us know!

Thanks, Raffi