It follows the approach of trying to suggest as few plants as possible, by using climate and soil factors to eliminate plants not suited for the location.

When you are seeing a good plant list, you can email it to yourself, and then forward it to native plant nurseries to find out what they have in stock. Or, paste the list into a spreadsheet, and add your own notes about each plant.

For instance, it explains how you can use the What Grows Here? application to visualize the distribution of several plants -- on the same map at the same time -- by assigning a colored icon to each plant.

We also updated the listings for those nurseries still in business.
And added a few new nurseries selling native plants, such as the

Flowerdale Nursery in Santa Ana, Orange County.

If you have one or more photos of the plant, Calflora's Plant ID Help group may help.
There are some very capable plant identifiers who belong to this group.
 

Fern Canyon area, Humboldt Co.

Byne-Milliron Forest, Santa Cruz Co.

Santiago Peak, Orange Co.

Point Pinole, Contra Costa Co.

About the Great Places project
Each Great Place is indicated by a polygon boundary. When you open Great Place page, the software collects all native plant observations within that boundary. On the page, you will see the plants categorized by lifeform; if you open Shrubs for instance, you will see all of the shrubs observed at that place.

If any of the observations of plants have their own photos, these are included first. If there is any left over space, it is filled up with reference photos of the plant. How many photos you see of each plant depends on how wide your browser window is. To see the most photos per plant, make your browser window take up the whole screen.

If you work for a native plant nursery, here are a few details about how to utilize this free service:

• The public wants to know what plants you sell, and CNPLX can help tell them. The easiest way to create and maintain a listing on CNPLX is to put a list of the plants you sell on a single web page, and then either make a contributor account yourself (below), or just write to the editor about it.

• The plants on your web page can be scanned periodically by CNPLX. This greatly reduces the work that needs to be done when your list changes. (Ideally you only need to maintain the list in one place.) Or, you can edit the listing for your nursery, and paste in a new list of plants whenever it changes.

• For each plant on your list, a link to your nursery website will appear on the corresponding CNPLX PLANT INFORMATION page (for example, Acer macrophyllum). Each plant-specific link will make your nursery's website more visible on the web.

• To take advantage of the automatic scanning capability, do not put your plant list into a PDF document. PDFs are almost impossible to scan.

• Potential customers for a particular plant will be referred to your nursery directly from CNPLX, and also through other services such as Calflora or the NRCS eVegGuide.

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.
 

Other useful options on the search page include

• show plants which are Cal-IPC listed invasive weeds;
• show plants which are commercially available;
• show CNPS listed rare plants; and
• group plants by lifeform, family, or plant community (with an option to collapse all groups when the page first comes up, showing only the number of plants in each group).

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.

For example, Arctostaphylos 'Emerald Carpet', whose ancestors include Arctostaphylos uva-ursi and Arctostaphylos nummularia.
 

You can use this tool to see another webpage through the lense of either Calflora (species information) or CNPLX (availability), clicking directly on a species name instead of copying and pasting. This ability can also be useful if you are responsible for webpages that contain lists of California species, and would like to give users a direct link to either Calflora or CNPLX.

Examples:

• From the Theodore Payne Foundation's Native Plant Garden Tour (April):

  Imagine that you go on the TPF tour, visit this garden, and want to find out where to get some of the same plants for your own garden.

  • Calanda Avenue Native Plant Garden (courtesy of Krista Maxwell)

• The Flora of Edgewood Park (San Mateo County) compiled by Toni Corelli for the Santa Clara Valley Chapter of CNPS, with links to Calflora inserted.

• Rick Franklin and Janice Woo’s Native Plant List, El Cerrito (from the Bringing Back the Natives garden tour)
  

To see exactly which plant names are found in a document and why, try the Nomenclature Analyzer.
 

For instance, on the information page for madrone, Arbutus menziesii, click on the link

What plants grow with Arbutus menziesii ?

Look for the header
• Inventory page scan date:
  and the date that the page was last scanned next to a particular nursery:
• 11/15/2011

By having both synonyms and cultivars, CNPLX is able to find many more species names (when scanning nusery webpages) than it could when using only Jepson Manual names.
 

On a species detail page, you will see any past synonyms or new names articulated in the upper right. Roll the mouse over a name to see where it came from (XWALK, ICPN, PLANTS, or CNPS). Click on Synonyms to see the status of the name from Calflora.
 

How it works. To add a listing to CNPLX, you need a contributor account. First, start a session. On the next page, press the link to make a new contributor account, and enter a valid email address.

To contribute a listing for your nursery,
1) start a session,
2) on the next page, press the link to log into your existing contributor account, and
3) press the ADD A SITE link.

To edit the listing for your nursery,
1) start a session,
2) on the next page, press the link to log into your existing contributor account,
3) go to the PROFILE page for your nursery, and
4) press the EDIT link in the upper right.

Local location checklists are also included on the county profile page, when available. Location checklists are no longer cross-referenced on species detail pages.

Before, the policy was to only include nurseries that were willing to provide a species list in some form. Now, county profile pages include nurseries which are reputed to grow or sell some natives, even if we have not been able to obtain a species list.
 

Here are our 2004 seed lists. Thank you for listing our seeds... we have received some business in this way.

1938 species are available (as seed or plants) from at least one nursery.

889 species are available from only one nursery.

452 species are available from at least five nurseries.
 

You can make a similar location checklist page like this:

define a checklist;

run REPORT;

save the resulting page as an HTML file; and

email the file to your associates or put it on your website.

CNPLX checklists are also useful for shopping. I am now in the process of compiling a list of species to be planted in the fall. When I run REPORT on the checklist, it tells me exactly which nurseries carry each species. Armed with the report, I can pick out the most relevant nurseries and plan a shopping trip.
 

Added Appleton Forest Nursery in Sebastopol. This nursery grows trees from locally collected seed, including 7 species of oak. Other interesting plants available here include Angelica tormentosa and Oemleria cerasiformis (oso berry).

Neither of these nurseries has their own website.
 

A suggestion: since you are already able to categorize the results by things like soil, perhaps the categories could be added to the query engine; for example, I'd like to query for all Dudleya species that grow well in clay. Also, it would be nice to give some visual highlight to species that are available from some nursery versus those that are not.

...it would be helpful if the search function accepted commonly used alternate names for species. "Mahonia" for "Berberis" for example. I think the powers-that-be (or at least some of them) want us to use "Berberis" instead of "Mahonia", but a Google search turns up twice as many entries for Mahonia aquifolium as for Berberis aquifolium.

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Thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorus)