It may be there and I just don't see it but one of the things I really miss from that other site is the personal info about plants from other users. I would love to see that in south Florida they put xxxx plant in part sun because the sun in that latitude is just too strong. Whatever, something like that, personal descriptions of actually growing the plant.

In addition, while I appreciate that our members know the latin names for plants and are so precise, I would also like that a search defaulted to the generic page on that plant. What started me down this path today was looking for info on Fish tail palms. There are half a dozen listed, frankly I don't care which one I have as they probably all grow about the same, what I did want to find out was if anyone else had had their fish tail palm finish its life cycle, bloom all the way to the ground, and then die. I would have liked to read their experience with that and perhaps leave my own info. I went to the generic fish tail palm page and there is very little there. If it were the default page, perhaps there would be more info? Also, if there were some encouragement to leave info about your experiences growing whatever then maybe we'd develop a base of personal knowledge?

I'm sorry to say that I don't find this database very useful for what I need, I'm sure it is useful for other things. The general, how does this grow type question... not so much.

Count me as another person who loves to hear the good, the bad or just the experiences others have had with a plant I am considering purchasing. I've bought a few duds and would like to avoid it in the future.

I think the "comments" section is where we are supposed to give information about how a plant grows in our climate, in our own garden and our experience with said plant. I'm guilty for not adding my comments about how particular plants grow for me ... it's been on my to-do list and I hope to get around to it at some point.

Yes, the comments section is the place to give those kinds of personal anecdotes. We have many times in the past encouraged comments by offering contests and things like that to spur people to post more.

I've thought a lot lately about ways of getting more conversation going in the database and this very week we're celebrating the ATP database and I have some things I want to try out later this week if I can get my thoughts all organized on what I want to do.

We definitely need more comments posted, though.

I was hoping you had something up your sleeve Dave, that's why I decided to post this during 'Database Week'. Thank you.

If a plant is rare enough, the few people who have listed the fact that they "Have" it might be eager to discuss their experiences in Tree-mail or a thread.

Boiling down such a conversation and posting it to a comment would be a generous contribution to the database and the community.

I wonder if changing the title of "comments" to something like "describe your experiences growing this plant" would encourage people to add the information. Also including a field for zone would be helpful. If someone one is growing a plant in zone 5 for example, he/she would have different experiences than those of someone growing the same plant in say, zone 10.

The zone does show next to your name in your comments.