I like closeups. With my poor health, I also have bad memory. I don't recognize a lot of the plants in my own photos unless there are closeups of them. Then I can have a chance of remembering sticking my camera in their faces.
Some flowers, I need to know their growth patterns. Like pampas grass. A lot of people like to trim them down very short. But I found their colors were very beautiful in their winter colors. My stonecrop was just as interesting during dormancy as it was in full bloom. And I want to see different stages of growth for some things like my elderberry flowers. Especially when I first start growing something and only know what a mature plant/bush will look like. I want to know what the seed pods look like, how it looks when it is on its last legs, how the berries are supposed to look. I have received and planted the wrong mail order plants. Sometimes not discovered until a year later when blooms look nothing like I expected.
Maybe I need a plant to be a focal point, but all I've ever seen are the flowers. And then there are the coneflowers. Echinacea looks great in bloom. But the petals look pretty bad very quickly. For people that don't do a bit of research, they might be shocked that such praise is given these flowers that don't look picture perfect for their entire growing season.
Evan is very correct that some plants and flowers may look different with different climates or different soils or with and without correct fertilizers. I lived with a friend for a month. Right across the street, the nice gentleman hired a crew of landscapers to plant hosta all around his sloping south side of his home. I knew instantly that was a mistake because I got that same hosta from my neighbor who was very disappointed in their looks growing them in full sun. They looked like totally different and perky plants under my juniper bush where they got very little of the west sun.
I talked to the guy across the street and learned that the hostas were his wife's idea. I told him my experiences and my neighbor's woe. It only took a couple months for him to decide to dig up all the hosta. He wanted to dig it up as soon as he talked to me, but the wife had to see it with her own eyes.
Sometimes a word will come to me and I have to peruse the database until I see the plant I'm after, having only a word to go by. Which is more often common names, like my stonecrop. I don't personally believe there can be a right or wrong way to make use of all the experiences of gardeners collected in a database. I didn't think about how hairy borage can be until I tried it in a salad. I was too busy looking at a single flower, not the entire plant. I learned to pay more attention to the details of all my edibles instead of focusing on the parts I planned to eat while ignoring the unpleasant parts.
