What are Core Plants and how do you use them?
Plants Map Core Plant profiles launched in August 2018. Based on user feedback, we added this feature to provide plants with basic general information that you can quickly add to your My Plants Map library as ‘starter’ plants to begin a plant list.
Adopting core plants is a Plus subscription tier feature. Learn more on our pricing page.
Once you add a core plant to your My Plants Map library they are transformed into your plant pages with additional owner fields and the ability to add your own unique stores, photos, notes and map location.
What is provided for you will be the fields with basic plant details, growing preferences and attributes. This information can also be adjusted as needed based on your experience with the plant.
We will continue to add more core plants over time as we see plants being added by the community. In general, if a plant has been added more than three times by different users, this will be an indicator to us to add that plant to the core plant list. We will verify the plant details and create a generalized core plant.
Steps to add a Core Plant to your My Plants Map library
1) You must be signed-in and have a profile to use this feature. Note: Organization profiles need to use the profile menu to switch to acting as the organization profile to add plants to the appropriate My Plants Map library.
2) Use the Plant Finder tool to search for a plant by name. We recommend using the botanical name. You will see a result of plants based on your search terms. If a Core Plant is available it will be at the top of the results. Not all plants have core plants yet as we are in the process of building the core plant library. You can also just select the purpose filter to see all core plants available in order by botanical name.
3) There are two ways to add a core plant: select the core plant to review it first or click the Add to My Plants Map link to directly add it into your My Plants Map library.
Click to add: The fastest method is to click on Add to My Plants Map and a confirmation pop-up window will result. Continue adding core plants to your My Plants Map library using this option. When you want to edit your plants, visit My Plants Map in the top navigation to see your library. Plants can also be deleted in edit mode.
Select, review and add: You can select each plant to review the starter information first and to see matching community reference plants. Note this view also gives you a hint as to the profile the plant will be added to.
Editing Plants
Once the plants have been added to your My Plants Map library you will see a starter story and the full plant page with tabs and fields that have auto-filled.
You can edit each plant with your own photos, your own unique story, map location, and notes.
You are also able to edit any information that was provided as well, such as changing the color of the flower or adjusting the size.
A title is the only required field. You can change the title of the plant to your preference of botanical name, common name, descriptive name, etc. Note that you may also need to adjust the botanical name, common name, and taxonomy fields in the tab below.
Learn more about Adding Plants.
