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Recent Contributions

Polycultures, Guilds & Companions...

In addition to each plant being able to record interactions with other individual plants, users can also create polycultures or guilds of known plant combinations that work well together.

We are at the very start of our collection of polycultures with The Three Sisters set up as a quick example. You can create your own favourite polycultures here:

An open encyclopedia of plant information

There are plenty of sources of plant information online. So what makes Practical Plants different?

It belongs to all of us

Everything is editable by anybody, and licensed under a Creative Commons license to be used by anybody. This is incredibly important for the future as "social" websites claim ownership of our information. The data we create belongs to all of us in common, not any one person or organisation.

A specific focus for a broad audience

It's simple: if a plant has practical uses, inform how to propagate, cultivate, and use it. There is a natural bias towards environmentalism, sustainability, and against chemical agriculture, but the information is widely applicable.

It's practical

Covering edible, material and medicinal uses, design functions, propagation, cultivation, environmental preferences, interactions, polycultures (and so on...) Practical Plants provides everything you need to know to choose, grow, and identify plants.

The flexibility and strength of a wiki-base

Practical Plants articles are collaboratively edited, like a wiki, and contain embedded data which is machine readable. This enables advanced search capabilities while still presenting people with articles written to be read by human eyes, not fields of data intended for a machine.

Curious about getting involved?

Practical Plants opened it's virtual doors on 1st August 2012. There is much to be done cleaning up articles, adding more articles, polycultures, interactions, uses and so on. Check out our help pages or join us on the forums to ask any questions, give feedback and find out the latest news.