Digital Innovation in the Garden: Tools that Simplify Plant Acquisition

In fall 2022, the Gardens was awarded an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Museums for America grant to create a new acquisition system for horticulture collections. Now, the project is nearing completion.  

Thousands of Plants Added Annually

Why did we apply for funding for this project? The short answer is “better and more timely data.” The horticulture team procures and produces thousands of plants for our collections each year: On average over 3,800 new acquisitions are added between York Street and Chatfield Farms, and even more are grown for programs like the CSA and plant sale. Included is everything from a maple tree purchased from a local nursery to seeds collected in Kazakhstan for the steppe collection, a flat of petunias raised from commercially purchased plugs to seeds collected from the Rock Alpine Garden for supplementing the alpine collection.  

Challenges and Solutions 

With the multiple entry points for plant materials into the Gardens, capturing the data for our collections can be challenging. Many plants are started by seed, cuttings or plugs in the greenhouses at York Street or Chatfield Farms, adding to the timeline from initial acquisition to incorporation in a garden. Specialized plants often have unique cultivation requirements, knowledge which evolves and is tracked over time through the experimentation and shared experience of our greenhouse production team. Ultimately, the goal is to track any plant added to the collections in our database, BG-BASE, with data including name, source, received date and quantity received. The system addresses these challenges with three new integrated tools.  

The Integrated Tools

The expeditions tool allows us to collect high-quality data when obtaining plant material from the wild. Field challenges such as heat, wind, rain and long hikes can make the pursuit of high-quality data difficult. Data is now collected digitally on a tablet using ArcGIS Field Maps rather than by hand in paper notebooks. This allows us to gather accurate GPS data, elevation and images alongside specific plant and habitat data. Once the team has an internet connection, the data is uploaded and can be edited and prepared for accessioning. Thus far, this tool has been used for collections in Lesotho, Mongolia and Kazakhstan in addition to the Rocky Mountain region.  

The second tool will improve communication for the horticulture team. Plant orders will be submitted through an online form, allowing team members to request plants from both internal and external sources. After these orders are entered, the production team can add cultivation notes and track the many steps it takes to grow a propagule to a finished plant. Once a plant is installed in a garden, the horticulturist can confirm that it was planted and communicate any changes from their original planting design to the plant records team through the online application. In the meantime, plant records staff verify passport data before adding new accessions to the database, BG-BASE. Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), developed as part of this project, automate the flow of data to BG-BASE. 

This third tool, the accessioning tool, will eliminate hours of data entry by automating the accessioning process, allowing the plant records team to spend more time on higher-order tasks including analysis and research activities.  
We plan to share these new tools with our project partners, the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University and Montgomery Botanical Center, who helped in the planning and development process, and more gardens in the future.  
This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services Grant MA-251823-OMS-22.