You are welcome Mike!
I understand it's all a bit confusing right now. ATP has a gazillion features. But one of the best things about this site is that it is extremely easy to navigate. I think that throws people b/c we are inherently looking for things to be complicated so we tend to overlook the simple, easy things. Just relax & stop pressuring yourself. It's amazing what you will see when you are not searching so hard. Maybe a case of not being able to see the forest for the trees?
Whenever you want to find the latin name of a plant that you only know the common name for then just Google the common name. You may come up with 15 wildly varying plants all with the same common name but *yours* will be in there somewhere. When you find it then you will find the latin name. Then you can put the latin name (I copy & paste often!) into the search field of our database to find you plant here. You can edit the plant name to add the common name or names that are missing from the plant info.
All the members of ATP have *built* the database and we continue to do so. Some plants don't have common names added yet but I know there are 2 less now than there were before you posted your question.
We all contribute to filling in the missing data on plants and that ranges from common names to culture requirements to photos. Also we like photos of all the different parts of plants not just blooms. Someone may be trying to identify a plant of theirs that has not yet bloomed so a photo of the leaves, the trunk or bark, the stems, the buds can all help identify a plant. So please as you get time add your photos of differing parts of your plants. I imagine you have a lot of wonderful plants that we don't yet have photos of in our database. There is a comment section too below the data for each plant where you can add your own thoughts about a plant -- you love it & why -- you hate it & why -- what great features it has etc...
But most of all ~~~ ENJOY!
