The Royal Horticultural Society's PlantFinder

The new edition of the Royal Horticultural Society’s PlantFinder is now out both in book form and free online.

This is one of the most important horticultural works ever published – and a new edition appears each April. This year it lists over 75,000 plants, with 4,000 new entries in this edition, all with the correct, up-to-date, botanist-verified names. For British and European gardeners primarily (though not exclusively), it also lists which nurseries sell each and every plant.

No serious gardener can be without each annual edition. Need I say more?

In Britain the RHS PlantFinder is available direct from the RHS. It’s also available from amazon.co.uk. I urge you to buy from the RHS as this will more effectively support their work – that is, they make more money that way.

In North America, the RHS PlantFinder has not been available from amazon.com for some years. You can order it from the RHS, but I’m afraid they'll have to charge you about $15 shipping. But remember, it’s free online.

And perhaps this is the point to say: I enthusiastically commend the Royal Horticultural Society for continuing to make their PlantFinder available online to everyone at no charge. Making such information available free to everyone helps unify plant names – which makes life so much simpler for all gardeners, amateur or professional.

Update:...

Update: Back in England I’ve picked up a copy of the new edition – which runs to almost 1000 (yes, that’s 976 pages!). This is the 20th anniversary edition and includes a fascinating essay, by Mike Grant, editor of The Plantsman magazine, on trends in plants over the last twenty years. There’s also a valuable contribution by Guy Barter, Head of Advisory Services at the RHS, on Water in the Garden. I was amazed to read that in peak summer periods over 70% domestic water goes on to the garden. There a few plant name changes, not many thank goodness: Eupatorium has been split into seven new genera and there are changes in Begonia, Chrysanthemum, Fuchsia, Rosa and Verbena but no great upheavals. All this provides even more reasons to buy the new edition.

Comments

[max]

The Plantfinder is of course an amazing resource, but it would be tremendously useful to those of us in the colonies if mailorder nurseries were further subdivided by their willingness to export outside the EU.

[Graham Rice]

It would, Max, you're right. At the moment you have to check the listing for each nursery in which you're interested. I'll ask the PlantFinder team if they can adjust the database to make clear those nurseries willing to export outside the EU.