After working as a cameraman on the BBC David Attenborough's "The
Private Life Of Plants" I realised that I didn't know much about which
plants to grow in my garden or when or how to prune them. I use books
but this can be laborious so it seemed with a modern computer age that
it would be neat if the computer did the searching for me instead.
This gave me the idea of making an interactive plant selector &
pruning guide encyclopaedia CD-ROM.
I got respected authors with mud under their fingernails to do the
writing, I would provide the images and I was fortunate to find a
programmer who could make it all work.
Due to interest from students and designers we made a MAC & PC version
too.
We're launching our latest version at the RHS Chelsea flower show
21st - 26th May and would be delighted to demonstrate it to anyone who
is going.
Our latest venture is to stream the software over the internet. If you
search for garden streaming on google there is some info about what
streaming is - but basically you access the garden software but don't
download it to your computer. You can add your own notes and plants on
the software to the calendar lists and these list remain on your hard
drive so they are available when you next sign on.

I hope this blog is not considered too much like advertising as I have
not mentioned where you can find the garden software CD-ROM yet as
hardly anyone is aware that interactive plant resources exists or are
available I think blogs are here to inform people. The number of times
I've heard Garden Designers say "I wish we had that when I was at
college" means that people want to know. I've been invited to
demonstate the CD-ROM on garden design courses by the tutors, which I
take as a compliment
I hope the streaming will be of interest to people not only from the
UK (for which the garden software is designed)
I'm continuing to add plants and hope to include Time-lapse sequences
to show some of the fascinating world of plants as we did on the BBC
series.