Cataloguing the living collection

The Garden now has a modern plant database – IrisBG – which we the Friends paid for. 

Previously, the Garden had 3 different databases, dating back decades.  One was rolodex type, one was on old floppies, and one a bit more modern. They were each horribly out of date, or incorrect, or did not agree with each other.  

IrisBG is the new broom to help the Garden staff start cataloguing the living collection from scratch, with reference to old information to hand of course (insofar as it helps at all).  The Garden team report that the IrisBG database is being well used, and they are in the process of buying a computer tablet so that recording what plants are in each bed can be done in the Garden.  In the meantime, Sarah has been drawing maps of flower beds and other areas and identifying plants ready for entry to the database.

There is a geo-tagging module which could mean no further need to label plants on the ground (and yes, visitors do take labels away, whether as mementos or to help them acquire the plant in question).  The big advantage of IrisBG is that lots of Botanic Gardens and other major gardens such as Branklyn now use this system, so information is easily shared about who has what.