About Plantwire

Plantwire is a fun, easy way to find and learn about plants.

We provide information on many of the world's most beautiful, interesting, and important plants. You can search by plant name, flower color, or by tags. Our database now includes over 300 plants and is growing quickly. We provide general descriptive information, flower colors, and basic instructions on how to grow and propagate each plant. More than 6000 images are included.

This is a public beta

We are working hard to develop and improve this website. Our database is growing, and we are working on new features for searching and navigating the world's plants. Please help us grow by suggesting new plants, recommending new features, and correcting errors in our database. We would love to hear from you-- Just use the “contact us” link, and please provide your email address if you'd like to hear back from us.

We love plant photos

Plantwire uses images from Flickr, the online photo management and sharing application. We browse Flickr for plant images and select the best for inclusion on Plantwire. We only display images that are licensed for commercial use through a Creative Commons license. Flickr users are the owners of the photos they provide, and we respect their wishes regarding how the images should be used.

We work hard to identify plants in the Flickr photos accurately, but please let us know if you notice any misidentifications.

We welcome photo contributions to Plantwire-- Simply follow these steps: (1) Sign up for a Flickr account if you don't have one already. (2) Upload your photos. (3) Make your photos visible to the public. (4) Apply a creative commons license that allows commercial use. (5) Tag your images “plantwire” or contact us so we can find them.

If you would like to nominate someone else's Flickr images for inclusion in Plantwire, please contact us.

To have your photos removed from Plantwire please contact us and we'll be glad to remove any or all of your photos. Alternatively, you may change the licensing terms for your images in Flickr to exclude commercial use. You may also make your photos private or delete them. Any of these changes to your Flickr images will cause them to disappear from Plantwire in about 24 hours.

This product uses the Flickr API but is not endorsed or certified by Flickr.

We use standardized plant names

Our choice of scientific names is based on the USDA Germplasm Resource Information Network Taxonomy (USDA-GRIN Taxonomy) database. It is a standard reference for cultivated plant taxonomy, including accepted names and synonymy.

We choose common names based on what we see in use in the plant industry (e.g. seed catalogs, horticulture periodicals, botanical gardens), but we realize there is a great deal of variation in the choice of common names for many plants.

We use the USDA GRIN Taxonomy database for our plant name searches. This makes it possible to find plants by scientific or common names in several languages. The search results link to Plantwire's growing information and images, if available, and to records from the USDA GRIN site. Plantwire's data are limited to some of the world's most popular and interesting plants, so many searches will only yield results from USDA GRIN Taxonomy.