Gardens Maximize Staff Efficiency With Garden Notepad

About Garden Notepad
Other Feature Articles

Garden Notepad is a time and labor saving feature of BG-Map that allows garden staff to capture information about the size and condition of plants in the field on a hand-held computer. BG-Map users have embraced Garden Notepad enthusiastically. Here are some comments:

"Garden Notepad has worked well for us. The Horticulture Department is working on an evaluation of three of our flowering tree collections, and so as the test project for Notepad, we collected the data for them. The data collected was mostly dimensional: DBH, height, spread, and number of trunks. In cases where trunks could not be measured at 4.5 feet above grade a "check note" was entered to explain where diameter was taken. The results were excellent with a flawless upload to BG-BASE and easy access to the information through the map from there on out.

Using your pseudo-TCL command line I was able to query for all mapped plants in the genus Prunus with a DBH in excess of 12 inches and got a list back nice and quickly. This is going to be a big help as we add more and more of dimensional data to our database.

Thanks for putting the Garden Notepad together for us. Its great!!"

Wayne Cahilly
Manager of Institutional Mapping
The New York Botanical Garden

"I have used the Garden Notepad in our Core Gardens inventory of plants. I saved so much time in the field and in the office. Because I key in the accession number that I find on the tag and it is updated in BG-BASE, there really isn't much guess work."... (Prior to using Garden Notepad) "I found myself with paper inventories having to go back out into the field and recheck to make sure I was finding the right plant."... "What usually took about a week or two doing the inventory and entering the data, I am anticipating can be done in under a week including producing replacement labels!"... "I feel that the Garden Notepad is a helpful addition to our plant records system! I am also glad that I am able to use our palmtop other than solely for mapping purposes."

Angela Brown
Plant Recorder
The North Carolina Arboretum

Garden Notepad