How to catalog and label your garden
"Uhh... so this is a white pine... of some kind..."
Ask the average person with a garden, and they’ll likely have a couple of very special plants. It might be a rose dug up and transplanted when grandparents passed, or maybe a beautiful perennial given to them by a friend. They probably don’t know the Latin name or the particular cultivar, but that doesn’t really matter - it is loved.
When one is a serious gardener, one starts to have many special plants, and we, too, love them all. But also, when you’re a serious gardener, it’s no longer acceptable to point a plant out and casually wave a hand, “Oh yes, that’s some sort of Japanese Maple.”
Eventually, you will want to keep track of exactly what you’re growing along with other facts, like when it was planted, where you bought it, or whether it will top off at ten or forty feet. This is not only so you have a personal record of what you’re growing to refer back to, but also so you can have more meaningful conversations with plant friends who may one day visit.
As much as I love sketching and writing things on real paper, I was never happy with keeping a physical notebook for my plant records. Whatever I did never felt beautiful enough to be artistic or neat enough to be properly scientific. I wanted it to be one or the other, and since it was neither, I wasn’t motivated to keep up with it.
For a while, my system of keeping notes on plants was simply taking a picture of the label and saving it to an album on my phone. This was far from ideal: there was no way to add additional notes, and I often forgot to add the photo to the album. This meant that months on, when I was looking for it, I could never find it amongst the hundreds of photos I’d taken since then. It was an equal possibility that I had forgotten to take the picture at all. I would never know.
When we moved to Woodside, I knew our gardens would be much larger, and I would hopefully be maintaining them for years to come. I wanted to do better.
My Perfect System
I wanted two ways of referencing plants.
One: A database I could access anytime via my phone or computer. This had to have a gallery view for quick reference and customizable fields. There are many purpose-built plant apps out there, but a lot of them are targeted toward indoor plant or vegetable growing. I didn’t want extraneous features I wouldn’t use or an AI telling me when it thought I should water things. I also didn’t want to use Excel because I use it too much for work, and I didn’t want to feel like I was working while gardening.
Two: Labels in the actual garden. There’s nothing more frustrating to me than visiting a botanical garden where nothing has been labeled. I’m not naming any names, and I’m definitely not making any comparisons between our garden and a proper botanical garden; I’m just saying it’s a pet peeve. I wanted to walk out into our garden and quickly see what something was without trying to remember its name or having to look it up. This became especially true for our Japanese Garden, which was quickly filling up with young conifers and maples. The labels also had to last a long time, be relatively inexpensive, and not look out of place or detract from the garden's overall look.
I spent several very serious months looking at and trying different options before finding the best combination.
Plant Database
I landed on Airtable for the database component. These days, Airtable is marketed as a “platform for apps,” but it began as (and still works as) a free cloud-based Excel alternative. If you need basic functionality, it’s free. In it, I could set up a catalog of plants and customize the fields attached to each record. On the phone, with the Airtable app, I can browse the entire list in a gallery view with photos and a few chosen fields. Clicking through gives me all the rest of the details:
Here’s what I track:
Photos (I try and include one of the plant when it goes in the ground, and one from the internet of what it will look full size)
Plant Name
Location (where in the garden it is planted)
Vendor
Date Purchased
Date Planted
Size
Notes
Labels in the Garden
As much as I was intrigued by the look of slate and engraved labels, I ultimately chose a system of printed labels (on UV-resistant clear stickers) applied to metal labels. It’s clean, readable, and easy to make new labels. I suspect I’ll wind up replacing the stickers at some point, but I think the label signs themselves will last forever.
Here’s what I bought:
Obviously, not every plant in the garden gets a label; some are easily identified natives, and others are so common there’s no point. But there’s a certain joy in adding labels to things and a satisfaction in knowing that ten years from now, I’ll be able to look back and see a documented history of the gardens and the plants that grow there.
“Field Notes from Woodside Gardens” is a collection of stories about creating a garden. Most Fridays, I share what’s going on in our garden, along with tips and ideas that you can use in yours, wherever you are. Please consider becoming a free subscriber if you haven’t already done so.
Great label maker. I found that white labels worked better for my tree markers. At least I think I can read them easier.