During the Plantsmanship course, we were given the task of proposing a concept to improve the accessibility of the RBGE collection. RBGE is diversely accessible to a multitude of demographics. Which is why it is one of the top visitor attractions in Scotland.
Plants give people pleasure and our four gardens – Edinburgh, Dawyck, Logan and Benmore – are collectively one of Scotland’s top visitor attractions with more than 900,000 visits per year. (RBGE 2015)
When I was at the Essen IPM this year, I was constantly getting peoples business cards. I was introduced to an App called CamCard by a friend of mine. It takes a photo of the business card then saves all the information to your phone and email with just a couple clicks. It can read 14 languages and has had over 100,000 downloads but, most importantly was completely FREE.
I am curious to see if this idea could be transferred over to the name tags at Botanical gardens. Simply take a photo of the plant and it would scan all the information for you and save it to your phone.
Providing the following information:
- Family, Genus, species ‘Cultivar’
- Photo of plant in all seasons, Herbarium photos
- General description, notable characteristics, propagation, how to grow, hardiness ect.. (similar to RHS Plant Finder)
- Map of distribution, in the garden and wild
- Date planted, history in garden
- Other plants in the garden, other gardens in Scotland and other botanic gardens. Link to databases.
- Available in the RBGE shop
This is just an original concept however, it does have a vast scope and can easily be developed further.