What is Plants Map?

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[The following post was originally an email sent to family and friends on January 15, 2014] 

We’re Planting A Seed To Connect People With Plants

  • Discover Plants and Gardens, Be a Plant Explorer; Be a Plant Collector
  • Social Gardening: Bringing people and plants together
  • Interactive, custom plant tags that use smartphone technology to connect people with plants.

It’s a new year and my husband and I had a new idea: Plants Map. We are launching Plants Map this weekend at Startup Weekend Fredericksburg.

We expect Plantsmap.com to break ground this Saturday morning (January 18 about 10am). The website will be in ‘seedling’ mode and grow throughout the day with features so don’t just visit once.  We are inviting everyone who appreciates trees, gardens and parks to visit Plantsmap.com & help us grow the site by creating their own profile and lists of plants in their gardens as well as lists of favorite plants at public gardens they have visited.

Connecting People

We envision that Plants Map will have two facets: A free, fun, interactive, social component where people can explore gardens, discover plants, and create their own plant collection lists. The plant species themselves will be the central focus. Our idea we feel is not just for gardeners, but for anyone who enjoys and supports gardens, public and private.

  • We want people to become ‘plant explorers’ and ‘discover’ gardens and plants & gardens they didn’t know before.
  • We want a place for ‘plant collectors’ to share their passion for gardening. And maybe your plants earn some ‘green thumb’ ratings too.

Connecting Plants

The other aspect is to create and make available interactive, affordable, attractive plant identification tags with QR codes that work with smartphone technology. We have already talked to gardeners and botanical gardens and feel their is nothing that has evolved that was easy to produce, long lasting, attractive and interactive.

Our target audience are public gardens that want a better option to digitally document their plantings for themselves and for others. We feel interactive plant tags with a social website for plant species will help attract more visitors. The social aspects are free and we want to provide something of service, value and usefulness to the users like tools to journal, photograph, map, and tag their plants.

A Seed Is Planted

We have lots of ideas for the website in terms of ways this can support neighborhood and community gardens and tree programs. As part of the launch this weekend we will create a ‘wish list registry’ of plant tags for Cossey Botanical Park, a public neighborhood arboretum maintained by volunteer Master Gardeners in Fredericksburg (VA). Our idea is that there are a lot of public community gardens that don’t have budgets for tags. So we hope to see if people will ‘sponsor’ a tag (map a plant) and order one for Cossey Park. More information about Plants Map and Startup Weekend is below.

We are inviting as many as we can to visit www.plantsmap.com on Saturday, January 18 to watch and see what emerges.

Thanks,

Tracy & Bill Blevins
Co-founders, Plantsmap.com
Connecting People With Plants

Startup Weekend Fredericksburg is January 17-19, 2014 and will be hosted at Germanna Community College Workforce & Technology Center.

Startup Weekend is a global grassroots movement of active and empowered entrepreneurs who are learning the basics of founding startups and launching successful ventures. The non-profit organization is headquartered in Seattle, Washington. Startup Weekend organizers and facilitators can be found in over 200 cities around the world.