Fertile ground for gardeners

Spring is here, the buds are bursting and online gardening is really thriving, as MICHAEL FOREMAN.

Now spring is well and truly in the air the thoughts of many will turn to love, but for the green-fingered among us it's also A time of cloches, corms and compost.

October has long been one of the busiest months in the gardening year as the planting season gets into full swing.

And in the past couple of years, gardeners have found what might seem an unlikely ally.

In New Zealand, as in the rest of the world, the relationship between gardening and the web is thriving, and plenty of websites cover all aspects of this subject - from designing and planning your garden to choosing and finding the right plants.

The web is also a valuable source of information on anything from composting to plant pests and, should you need inspiration, virtual tours of some of the world's famous gardens are just a click or two away.

With many leisure subjects, local websites tend to be more relevant than the international ones, and this is especially true with gardening.

The whole culture of gardening is often different in other parts of the world. The reversed seasons of the northern hemisphere mean that overseas sites are now tackling subjects such as clearing leaves and dead wood.

Gardening is big business everywhere, and many gardening websites, particularly in the United States, have been spoiled by rampant commercialism.

For example, a visit to the garden design site Rebecca's Garden Planner soon results in unwelcome pop-up ads promoting the site's owner, the giant Homestore chain.

You are left in no doubt that this is an American site for American visitors, who, judging by the liberal use of content that requires the Shockwave plugin, have bandwidth to burn.

Rebecca's interactive tool that promised to help you design your perfect garden looked promising, but we gave up waiting for this, as even on a relatively fast connection it took far too long to download.

Compared with this, the New Zealand-run Garden Design Information Site is refreshingly simple and fast. This website might lack the polish of its overseas counterparts, but its down to earth content is suited to local conditions and architecture.

"Where is your clothesline?" visitors are asked. Has it been planted in the middle of your lawn in full view of the lounge? It needs to be in a convenient place, but out of sight.

The big local general gardening sites, such as www.garden-nz.co.nz, www.gardens.co.nz and www.bestgardening.com, also give advice on design and planning as well as "how to" guides to selecting and growing the most popular types of plants.

But the easiest way to find more specific gardening information is to go a search engine such as Google and simply type in the name of a plant.

A useful tip here is to enter the common name of a plant, hops, for example, if you are after simple information, or search by a plant's latin name, Humulus lupulus, if you want to uncover the more in-depth stuff.

This type of search is also likely to find websites devoted to certain groups of plants, such as orchids or roses, or specific garden types and growing techniques.

Most local gardening sites include links to online gardening suppliers, but if you have trouble tracking a certain plant down, the New Zealand Plant Finder, lists 30,000 types of plants and seeds as well the nurseries that stock them.

The internet being what it is you will also find plenty of gardening-related sites which are a bit weird and wonderful.

Take the Telegarden for example, a now defunct experimental website that allowed internet users to view and interact with a garden filled with living plants.

When the site was operational in the late 1990s people could plant and water seedlings remotely by using the web to control an industrial robot arm.

Apparently, the purpose of the site was to model the post-nomadic community, where survival favoured those who work together. Right.

Finally, for a cheeky and entertaining introduction to the mechanics of plant growth, try downloading Slick Software's HighGrow which bills itself as the world's first artificially simulated marijuana-growing program.

Of course, possessing cannabis is still illegal in this country and, despite its harmless reputation, there are some health issues and concerns that it may lead you on to (to an interest in gardening in my case).

But the HighGrow plants are of the virtual variety only, so using this program is unlikely to get you into trouble with the law.

But, just to be on the safe side, you could remove the program before your crop matures.

Links

Rebecca's Garden Planner

Homestore

Garden Design Information Site

www.garden-nz.co.nz

www.gardens.co.nz

www.bestgardening.com

Google

New Zealand Plant Finder

Telegarden

Software's HighGrow