Good job Karen and I agree.

I love that whole page, Karen, and I think it's great to have pages like that for plants. Your variety covers all the bases.

I love to see the different parts of a plant, including pertinent damage and causes of the damage. I also like to see how a plant is used in the landscape.

I guess I am the only one looking at this from a different point of view. I agree that all of Karens pictures taken together really illustrate the plant extremly well. But lets say only the long shot view of the Butterfly weed was submitted? How would a non gardener and someone that did not know what the plant looked like then know which it was? So the picture I was originally writing about is not the same thing to me. If most people don't agree then that is ok, not trying to make you have to agree.

Newyorkrita said:IBut lets say only the long shot view of the Butterfly weed was submitted?

Then someone else can fill in the other types.

I do understand what Rita is saying in her last post.
I know I really dislike picking up a magazine with a photo of plants I don't recognize and they give a list/or partial list of the plants, but don't give reference to which one is which. I know that has happened with me looking at a beautiful photo of different succulents.
This doesn't apply to what Karen did because she definitely identified the plant and all it's parts. It was very easy to find A. tuberosa in here landscape photos, which I loved.

Rita, which one was it. Maybe I have a photo.

OK.

And I do get what Rita is saying, a landscape photo alone could be vague. I posted some of those too Here's an example

I knew that picture would be way too vague, so in the caption I added in parenthesis (green with purple streaks). I liked the shot though, it shows how pretty that plant can be when planted near purple/burgundy plants.

Karen

It does look gorgeous with the burgundy plants. The captions don't show up unless someone clicks on the photo, though, so could you add a photo to that page of just the Coleus in question? Or could you copy that photo, crop it down to show just the Coleus in question, and post that image?

I'll see what I can do.

Karen

From another thread on this subject in the database forum...

dave said:I'll weigh in here:
This is a challenge that seems to plague all online plant databases/encyclopedias.

On the one hand, you have a cultivated plant with hundreds or sometimes thousands of cultivars, but there is also an entry in the database for the main plant (without cultivar shown).

For example, "Tomato". We have an entry for "Tomato (Lycopersicon lycopersicum)" so do you upload a photo of Cherokee Purple to that entry, or the Cherokee Purple entry? What if no Cherokee Purple entry exists and you don't feel like adding the entry? Or what if you have a photo of a tomato seedling and it doesn't really matter what variety it is? Or what if it's a generic tomato and you have no idea what variety it is? You just plop your photo into the generic "Tomato" entry and let that be that.

People want to talk about a plant type in general (leaving comments that are applicable to all tomatoes, for example) so you create a catch-all entry in the database for that plant, but then you have all the other entries for all the cultivars.

Trish and I have discussed this at length and we think the solution is to have both: a main generic plant entry and also all the cultivars with their own entries.

But the main plant entry should have additional features. For one, it can be made into more of an encyclopedia entry, with a free form field for an article-length description of the plant. Then people can upload photos into that entry and then others can propose they be moved out into the various cultivars once the identity is firmly established.

Additionally, on those generic plant pages, we can feature the thumbnail images of the most popular cultivars of that plant (judged by which ones get the most thumbs-ups, for example).

and from Sue above in this thread...

Calif_Sue said:I have been talking to Zuzu about the generic rose entry and one thing we thought we'd like to do is add some general info like photos and descriptions of different rose classes and styles like singles, semi-doubles, full doubles, floribundas, hybrid tea shaped blooms, etc. and then just a few shots of them in landscapes and mixed beds. She was thinking that "mystery roses might not belong on this kind of page. When you look up "rose" in the encyclopedia, you won't see mystery roses, but you will see rose landscape scenes like Rita's, and this is supposed to be like an encyclopedia page." We may edit a few of hers down so we can add a few other images, not sure yet.

We can do something like that with daylilies. A few examples of the different forms and bloom traits, the species and the newest bloom styles and some daylilies in landscape shots would round it out.

(bold and italic put there by me for emphasis)

If you go to the hemerocallis daylily page, there are shots there of daylilies in beds, but also 3 that could be no ID, and one that the caption says it is no ID.
Daylilies (Hemerocallis)

I do think it would be great to have the encyclopedia type info - with daylily examples of different forms for example.

But I still do not think it is a good idea to just have bloom photos of NoID or any old daylily. Like I said above, with hundreds of thousands of seedlings grown each year, and as Sue corrected me - over 70,000 named daylilies - I do not see the point in having unnamed, or NoID daylilies on the main page. Species - yes. Examples of different forms or patterns - yes.

It sounds in Sue's reply to me above that she does not want NoIDs or just blooms that someone does not know what they are, or maybe seedlings on the main page.

Dave's post seems to me to say, even if you know you have Cherokee Purple, you don't feel like looking up the individual tomato to post it under, just post it on the main page. Sue seems to me to say she would like to use the main page as an information page, with shots of individual daylilies as examples of traits only. Maybe I am misunderstanding Sue's reply, or Dave's post.

I am not in favor of leaving them there hoping someone will ID them either. With 70,000 named ones, I do not believe one can actually ID a NoID daylily. You can guess, but you can't know. There are a handful of daylilies that do have very distinguishing faces and markings - but looking at the 4 on the main daylily page of the database - how would you ever ID them? They could be any number of different daylilies.

On plants that have 100 cultivars, so your not going to get that many entries - being able to put generic plants on the main page could be beneficial, but I don't think it is with daylilies. There are to many cultivars. We could easily end up with thousands of daylily "mug shots" on the main page.

I have to agree with Juli. I can't see the value of just adding mystery no ID daylilies to this section either. When I saw the generic daylily section I thought some species like ditchlilies would be perfect to add and then just daylily garden shots. Bed shots with masses of riots of colors of different daylilies, not closeups of just one type. So that is what I submitted because that is what I thought should be there.

Yes, that's what I think would be best, an information page, with shots of individual daylilies as examples of traits and then a few landscape shots. No unknown daylilies, they can start a new thread for that if they wish.
As you said Juli, for other genus without as many cultivars, it may be fine to add unknowns but for daylilies, it would be too much!

Good, Sue, I am glad we agree! When I saw the individual blooms and one that has NoID in the caption, I thought maybe you saw things differently.

I'm so glad I saw this and I agree. I put the noid daylily there. I thought it was just a place to put any daylily. You can remove it. I now understand.

Let's hold off on removing it for now. I have a lot of plans and room for noid plants fall into those plans.

>> Moreover, when a new rose is added, it automatically inherits these data fields.

COOL! This is a great feature.

I guess that generic entry for a whole genus would show up first in the list on the (for example) "browse by Genus | Salvia" page?

Thank you, Dave!

That's right, Rick. It'll show up first.

I'm working pretty steadily on this feature and I've made a lot of progress. When I get it someone finished, I'll turn toward navigation and make it easy for people to find these generic entries when they are looking for generic information.

For example, if someone searches for "Rose" or "Roses" they will be sent directly to the generic page, etc.

How about clematis? I have clematis pictures with five different no id types all planted on the same structure all blooming at once.