I notice in My List that my maples are not sorting as expected. My first two are natives with no cultivar name and are alphabetical by species (all is well). Then I have a bunch of Japanese maples (A.palmatum) and a couple Sycamore maples (A. pseudoplatanus). Those two groups are sorting by cultivar name, ignoring the species. I would expect all the Japanese maples to show up together, followed by the Sycamores, but instead they are interspersed. Is this normal?

(I don't mean to be a pest today, just doing some internal housekeeping)

This may be a question for Dave but this is how the database sorts plants if you browse by genus. Species alphabetically, then cultivars alphabetically (regardless of species).
ex. Browsing by genus: Acer.

The old sorting question... I'm always open to new proposals of how to sort the plants.

I guess I just assumed My List would sort using standard nomenclature - genus, species, cultivar. Is there a particular reason that I'm missing why there would not be a species sort level? It sounded like this has been discussed previously, sorry if this is all a repeat.

Well, I don't really know.

Right now it sorts first by genus, then by cultivar. It ignores the species altogether.

I just now updated the lists to make it sort by genus, species, cultivar. Check it out and see if it looks right now.

Wow Dave you have been so busy lately...that's fantastic!! Ehh...should we expect this all the time?

My personal list still is scrambled with the A.pseudoplatanus mingled in with the A. palmatums. I'll try exiting out and coming back in. I did do a refresh. I'm not much of a computer guru...

Edited: Still scrambled.

@Bonehead: I found the problem and fixed it. Look once again.

@dave Perfect - my sycamores are now together below my Japanese maples. Bravo and thanks for your help!

I like this new sorting system. It's nice to have all of my clematis cultivars grouped by species. Thanks for suggesting it, Deb, and thanks for making it happen, Dave.

I like it better this way, too.

Another abracadabra event. I can hardly believe all the new things I am finding today.
Thank you for asking Deb, and thank you for creating it Dave. For both of you.

Just asking, does this 'genus, species, cultivar' sorting apply only to a person's individual list? or to the ATP database?

At the moment, just the ATP database.

The search engines are still ordered by "best match", whatever that really means.

The "browse by genus" page sorts by cultivar name, then species.

So is it still common name first, then genus, cultivar and species?

Is there a magic button I can push to sort a list to show the botanical names first?
( I know I keep asking similar questions, sorry.)

The common name isn't taken into account at all when sorting.

There's no button to push that changes the way the names are displayed.

dave said:The common name isn't taken into account at all when sorting.

There's no button to push that changes the way the names are displayed.

Do you see that as something that will ever happen, or is it not really necessary? (just curious)

I really don't know. I try to avoid making the site work differently for different people because it gets unwieldy on the programming side.

Just wondering again. (Skipping over any non-English common plant names here) Since ATP reaches people in other English-speaking countries who may have completely different common names, and even here in the USA there are regional differences for common names, why is the common name listed first? I know I am old, half blind and mostly deaf, and feel like I might be beating a dead horse, but shouldn't the common name be the least important thing when doing a sort list? Maybe I am not using the best words to explain myself; here is a link which explains a bit better.

http://apps.rhs.org.uk/rhsplan...