In this post, I’ll explain how I’m making a database of all the plants in my garden and house and I’ll signpost you to the resources I’ve used, including my own Notion template, in case you’d like to try this yourself.
We recently bought a new house which has a mature garden with lots of different plants in it. I’m by no means an expert on plants, but I’m interested to learn about the plants we’ve got and to make sure we look after them.
Recently I’ve discovered that you can identify plants just using your phone. I’ve tried a few different apps and at the moment I’m using Plantnet. I love it – all you do is take a photo of your plant and then the app tells you the name of the plant. It’s free to download on Apple and Android.
But I’ve realised that sometimes I use Plantnet and then promptly forget what it’s told me. I didn’t want to do that with the plants in my new garden – having looked something up once, I wanted to keep a record of it. I wanted to built up a picture of everything I had in my garden.
Since listening to some of Ali Abdaal’s videos, I’ve been interested in trying out an app he uses called Notion to keep a record of things I learn and to organise my thoughts. So naturally I thought of using Notion to create a database of my plants.
This has turned out to be pretty straightforward and I’m really pleased with the results. I created a new database in Notion called “My Plants” and then each time I identified a plant, I added it to my database. I found it was easy to upload my Plantnet images to Notion, so that I can see what each plant looks like. Also, I’ve created tags so that I can tag each plant with the part of the garden it’s in. For me that’s North, South, West, Upper East and Lower East. Now I can view my database as a gallery of images, or as a table, and I can search by the area of the garden to find which plants are there.
Having already experimented a bit with both Plantnet and Notion, I found this pretty easy to do. I hope that if you’re interested in trying it you will also find that it’s straightforward. One of the nice things about Notion is that you can share a database template in case other people want to use it too. I’ve never done that before but I’m going to have a go at doing it here in case anyone else would like to use my Plants database template. Just visit that link and you should be able to duplicate my template in order to create a similar database of the plants in and around your home.
Good luck and please let me know how you get on. I’d love to see your results!