• Search for wild California plants by name or characteristics -- for instance:

  What plants grow wild in Kern County, and are likely to grow in wetlands?

  		Click on a plant name to see detailed information about that plant, including nurseries that sell it.

• Find out what other plants grow with an interesting plant in a certain part of the state. For instance, on the information page for coyote mint, Monardella villosa, click on the link
  
  What plants grow with Monardella villosa? (Note: this works best if you choose a county.)
  
  
• Find nearby native plant sources and other county-specific information by viewing a county profile :
  
  Profile of Santa Barbara County

A checklist is a list of plants -- for instance, that you might hope to see on a particular hike, or that you might want to plant in your garden. On CNPLX, you can make an electronic checklist, which will facilitate analyzing or otherwise manipulating a list of plants. To make an electronic checklist, first start a session, so that checklist data can be stored temporarily on the server. While the session is active, you can:

• Define a checklist by selecting plants one-by-one.
• Define a checklist by analyzing a webpage or other document.
• Add notes for each plant in the checklist.
• Save a checklist as a local XML file, and read a checklist in from a local XML file, and
• Categorize and analyze the plants in your checklist by using the SEARCH WITHIN function.

CNPLX is a growing collection.If you know of a nursery or horticultural website that refers to California native plants by scientific name, you can contribute a link to that site. To add a new reference website to CNPLX, first start a session, then create a contributor account with a valid email address (or if you already have a contributor account, log into it).

The contributor account feaure makes it possible for nursery staff to add and maintain their own listings on CNPLX . However, some nursery listings have already been added by the editor. If you work for a nursery that is already listed, and would like to take over the maintenance of the listing, please write to us.

In a typical search, you enter some criteria, see a list of matching plants, and click on the scientific name to get to the CNPLX plant information page.

At the bottom of the search page, however, there is a field called Name Linked to, which defaults to CNPLX. If you set the value of that field to one of the larger reference websites, such as the Las Pilitas nursery, then -- when you click on the scientific name on the matching page, you will go directly to a page about the plant on the chosen website! Thus you can use CNPLX as a way of organizing access to these other websites.

Output Format. If you want to take the data home and do something else entirely with it, the search page allows you to specify whether you want the results of your query as an HTML page (the usual way), as XML, or as plain text.