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Finding That Plant Online

© Marge Talt

In my article Foliage: The Living Palette - Part 4, I put out a call for help in determining whether a group of plants I'd made worked or not. Carol, Barbara and Debbie all had great suggestions. Carol came up with a plant suggestion, Heuchera 'Chocolate Ruffles' that suited me and triggered an idea for improving this group.

I checked out Heronswood, where Carol had found it, and then wondered who else on line might carry this plant. This led me to an intense search on the web. I thought I'd share my search with you. If my saga doesn't convince you of the worth of having a place like Suite101, where people have done all this for you, I don't know what will, besides doing it yourself -- once!

Over time, I've amassed a large list of online nurseries and Carol Wallace has a huge list on her page, but I thought I'd first try the major search engines to see what they produced. I was hoping they'd point me directly at the online nurseries who carried this heuchera. I searched on "heuchera chocolate ruffles".

Plant America's page explaining what PLANTLINKtm is all about. In addition to a cleanly designed page, the search functions make it easy for you. If you know the plant you're looking for -- and how to correctly spell its name -- you can just fill in the blank and hit search. If you don't know the name or how to spell it, you can look for the name in alphabetical sections under Family Name, Scientific Name or Common Name. There's even a link to The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew Genus Search engine.

First I went to PLANTLINKtm, a search engine provided by the Plant America site.

That search resulted in four hits; two for the wholesale trade. One of these, Terra Nova, turned out to be a great find; not because I could buy a plant there, but because they list a lot of heuchera as well as other perennials; most with decent photographs.

The other hit was Heronswood, where I'd started out.

Since the other hits had been found by Alta Vista and Infoseek, I next went to these search engines to see what else they might have. Alta Vista had the same four hits. When I changed the search to +perennial +catalog AND "heuchera chocolate ruffles", hundreds of hits came up; most irrelevant, but I did run into some new nursery catalogs online.

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