garden.com and search engines

Following is a suggestion for those of you who wish to search for a specific
plant on the Internet.  Some have recommended garden.com, and others have
stated that the choices of nurseries there are limited and also that there
are a lot of unknowns in dealing with some of the sources.

There is another method of searching the entire Internet for a specific plant
that you might choose.  My favorite search engine is Yahoo.

Last spring, I was searching for seven specific campanulas after reviewing
Campanulas: A Gardener's Guide by Peter Lewis and Margaret Lynch.  This is
the method that I used to find a resource for C. glomerata 'Superba', for
example.

(1) Go to www.yahoo.com.

(2) In the blank for your search terms type: "campanula glomerata superba".
The punctuation marks limit your search to that specific plant. You will find
12 web pages for nurseries or seed companies having this plant. Without the
quotation marks, the search is far too broad, yielding 50 web pages -- all
with the word campanula on them, but not necessarily Campanula glomerata
'Superba'.  The search engines are not interested in capital letters.

(3) Press Enter.

(4) Wait for the search engine to work, then review results.

Unfortunately, as I located the seven Campanulas I was interested in
acquiring, I found that the one nursery having most of them is located in
British Columbia, and does not ship to the US.  However, I did find a seed
company that had most of the seeds.  Campanula is very easy to grow from
seeds, making that a viable option.

Unfortunately, many fine nurseries do not have elaborately designed websites.
Plant Delights is readily found, as the website is very well done.  [It is
the metatags at the top of a  web page  that permit the search engine to find
the page with the specified text.  Metatags are hidden inserts at the top of
each web page, not seen by the web user, that lead a search engine to list
that page as having the search terms. It is expensive to develop a catalog
with metatags and shopping carts.] Thus, many other good choices might not be
located. Unfortunately, Plant Delights, had, at the time of my search, only
one of the seven plants I was interested in.

Searching for Arisaema candidissimum or A. fargesii, for example, using the
above method, will not, unfortunately, take you to Ellen Hornig's website
www.senecahill.com, as her catalog does not (at least at this point) have
metatags.  Ellen grows the best A. candidissimum and A. fargesii I've ever
purchased.

Thus, this method will not take you to every nursery growing a certain plant,
but is one method to be used to search for specific plants.

Jeanne Hannah
Traverse City, Michigan
USDA Zone 5b

I hope that this information is useful to some of you in this discussion
group.
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