For the Plantoholics 🌻🌼🌷
My mom was a total green fingers and my own personal walking encyclopedia when it came to plant knowledge. Not only was gardening a great passion of hers, but she also ran the Nurserymen's Association of South Africa for many years - so no doubt this added to her already extensive internal plant data base, lol.
When she got older, and had retired from her corporate career, she took a part time job at a local nursery. She worked there alongside her greatest gardening inspiration... a man called Herbie. He also taught my mom a lot about gardening and plants, so I was blessed my whole life to have a mom who could walk around pretty much any garden, anywhere and be able to rattle off scientific and common names for basically any plant we encountered.
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My Beautiful Mom
As many of you know, my mom passed away from breast cancer in June 2020 so, sadly I never got to share the joy of our new home with her... nor my garden, which I know would have been love at first sight for her. In fact, for the years that my mom had the part time job at the local garden centre, she actually did a little private landscaping for some of the well to do clientele. She would visit their homes, assess their gardens, sketch a concept for design and then quote them to do the job and they would obviously buy all the plants from the nursery that she worked at, so it was a win win for everyone. My point being, she was just a total natural when it came to designing and creating beautiful gardens.
There are so many moments when I find myself wanting to ask my mom a question or for some garden advice and sadly that is a hole which can never truly be filled. Sure, I have a fair amount of knowledge just through everything she taught me throughout my life, but I have had to seek out alternatives now for when it comes to identifying plants, trees etc. There might be a lot in my garden that I can identify, but there is also plenty that I was initially clueless on.
That was until I discovered the "Picture This" plant identifying app. Best discovery EVAAARR!!! As it says - it really is like having a botanist in your pocket. Over the months, I have tested it on plenty plants which I DO know the names for and it is almost always accurate.
So now, I use it continuously in my own garden as I am always discovering new things popping up here and there, as well as when I am out and about! It is like Shazam for plants haha! It is actually a paid app and whilst I would love to get the paid version at some point, because it allows you to keep an actual diary of all your own plants as well as other features - I just cannot currently justify the spend, so I just make use of the free version which is a gem enough simply for being able to identify what I am unsure of.
Once you have the name of the plant, you can then just use Google to research the rest of the info that you are after, which is precisely what I do. However, if you do get the paid version, like I said... you can actually diarise your own garden and it has plenty additional functions which stretch beyond identifying plants - such as diagnosing illness or poor health etc.
So there you have it! I thought I would share this little treasure with all of you because in the absence of my mom, it has become my right hand man in the garden! Enjoy! If any of you keen gardeners have any other cool apps that you use yourselves, I would love to know...
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Until next time...
Much Love from Country Bumpkinland, South Africa xxx
Jaynielea
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