Plant Selector help

Overview
Plant Selector offers you new, faster ways to find the plant information you're looking for.

Getting Started
Begin with the basic search box on the main page. When you type multiple words in the search box, Plant Selector looks for plants that contain all of the words. Such words can be part of a plant name, description, or characteristic.

Example: rosa red flower

What this means: Plant selector will interpret the words that it recognises like red and flower as characteristics and search specifically for those while making a more general search for the word rosa.

Be as specific as you can. The more detailed your search terms are, the more accurate your results will be.

Uppercase and lowercase are treated the same.

Using And and Or
And instructs Plant Selector to concatenate keywords so they form part of the same search. For example, searching on rosa and red and flower is the same as searching on rosa red flower and finds plants that match all of these keywords.

Or instructs Plant Selector to perform separate searches and concatenate the results. For example, searching on rosa or red or flower will find plants that contain the word rosa but in addition find plants that contain the word red and also find plants that contain the word flower.

By its very nature using or in searches is slower than using and. Therefore use or sparingly in your searches.

Word forms
Plant Selector can recognise various forms of the same word (referred to as inflections). In some cases synonyms are also recognised by Plant Selector. For example flower is the same as flowers, flowering, bloom, blooms, and blooming.

Wildcards
Plant Selector will recognise an asterisk at the end of a word as a wildcard. This is useful if you do not know how to spell a particular word or if you do not want to type a whole word.

Example: if you did not know how to spell chrysanthemum you could use the keyword and wildcard combination chrys*. This would find all plants containing the word chrysanthemum. Note that it would also return plants containing words like chrysanthus and chrysographes.

Entering values
Some characteristics have values associated with them, like ultimate height and time to ultimate height. To search using a value enter it using the characteristic name then an equals sign followed by the value.

Example: To search for plants that have an ultimate height of 0.5 to 1 metres use height=0.5-1. To search for plants that have a time to ultimate height of 5 to 10 years use time=5-10.

Note that the range you use for the height value has to be a valid range. These are: 0-0.1, 0.1-0.5, 0.5-1, 1-1.5, 1.5-2.5, 2.5-4, 4-8, 8-12, and >12.

Similarly the range for the time to ultimate height value has to be one of: 1, 1-2, 2-5, 5-10, 10-20, 20-50, and >50.

Getting Plant Selector to recognise characteristics
Some characteristics are formed of multiple words and as such contain spaces, e.g. Herbaceous Perennial. Normally each word would be used as a separate search term, so performing this search would retrieve those plants containing the word Herbaceous and the word Perennial. To instruct Plant Selector to use both these words as a single characteristic, surround them in square brackets.

Example: [Herbaceous Perennial]

Selecting characteristics from the available lists
Instead of typing in the characteristics of plant that you are looking for, you can select individual characteristics from the drop down list boxes.

Characteristic combinations
The characteristics of Feature, Season, and Colour are special in that their values are used in combination with one another. So for instance, selecting Flowers from the Feature list, Summer from the Season list, and Yellow from the Colour list would instruct Plant Selector to look for plants that flower yellow in summer.