It’s scary how many individuals depend on the Web for all their plant information. Certain, you’ll find some useful data on-line, however a lot of what’s there may be merely repeated from one author to the following, with out anybody who has truly grown the crops, checking it for accuracy.
Increasingly more vital books and journals are progressively getting scanned and can someday be accessible on-line, however there stays no substitute for a great library. Right here at JLBG, we’ve got simply accomplished a development challenge, which doubled the scale of our reference library. Though, we’ve got nothing in contrast with the nation’s massive, well-funded horticultural/botanical libraries, we really feel that we’ve got assembled an vital reference assortment for a botanical backyard our dimension. We’ve been very lucky over the past yr to inherit two good reference books collections, one with a give attention to plant introductions and exploration, which now might be shelved.
Our library focus is on reference books like Floras, in addition to books that go in depth on explicit plant teams and genera. Common panorama design books with no important historic worth should not inside our focus.
The file cupboards within the photographs embody 40 years of plant articles, pulled from numerous journals and vital plant magazines from all over the world. We expect most individuals right now can be shocked on the terribly excessive degree of horticulture practiced and written about throughout the previous few hundred years.
Moreover, e-mail discussions by the worlds high plant consultants from the early days of on-line communications are additionally preserved. Many of those consultants are actually deceased, however their plant information and voices have been saved. All this data is filed by topic.
Additionally in our recordsdata are vital plant catalogs, that are such an vital historic document of what was being grown and bought previously. I bear in mind having lunch with the late English plantsman, Graham Stuart Thomas at his house, and the factor that he was most happy with was his in depth assortment of great plant catalogs.
So, for those who run up on stacks of outdated catalogs, historic plant magazines, or plant reference books, don’t hesitate to examine with us earlier than sending them to the recycle bin.
