I ordered some new conifers this year. I have been collecting for ~6 years now. At any rate, I wanted to learn more about my conifers, so I decided to do a "mindmap" of my conifers. Mindmaps give you a graphical means to look at data. For example, I have a spreadsheet of my conifers... it's just a list. So here is a mindmap of some of the data:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent....

I use an open source (free) program called freemind. This is a work in progress. I have fun doing this and I thought I would share. I started this project this morning and it represents about 3 hours of work. I got tired and decided it was time for a glass of wine.

Also, I took photos of many of my conifers. It's actually a good time to take conifer photos, no competition.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/...

You are so organized!

I love it! I so wish I had the patience for that. I feel accomplished in that I just got all my plants on a spread sheet over the winter. But I will keep this is mind. It is definitely my kind of thing.

As a side note I did yard clean up for 4 1/2 hours. I'll join you in that glass of wine!

Frank, that is amazing! I'm not nearly as organized with the plants as you are (to put it mildly), but I need to check out "freemind" -- it looks like it would be a lot of fun to play around with (and maybe even useful for me...)

Very nice, Frank!

While you are at it, you might also want to group your genera by family, too.
http://www.pinetum.org/ click on "Taxonomy" on the left.

Updated the mindmap.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent....

I also included the garden location in parens.

I was thinking maybe I would do this by garden too. Would make it easy to ID.

I'm not sure this is the proper place to post this question, but I'd like to add a few conifers to my landscape along a low brick wall separating our house
from the neighbor on one side. This is a narrow space, probably no more than 10 feet wide, and it is where my a/c units are located beside our house,
so I need something fairly narrow in spread. I'd prefer a conifer with a columnar or vase shape and was considering a hicksii yew, but in reading up on
them, they spread more than is acceptable. The conifers will be planted along the low wall, of course, so some spread into the neighbor's yard
will occur, as well as the spread into our side space. I'm planting 4 Emerald arborvitae in the front of the house, one at each corner and one on each side of a
bow window, and it may well be that this is what I'll have to use along the side.

Any input or suggestions would be helpful.

@Hemophobic,
Perhaps the question would be seen by more people if you post it in the "Ask a Question" Forum.

(Frank, my mind is still reeling just thinking about what in the heck a 'mindmap' is. All I ever do is stick a plant in dirt and stand back. )

Thank you. I'll do that.