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| The Ever Blooming Flower Garden by Lee Schneller 2009 |
When I was working in the technology industry, I saw firsthand how showing people information in a visual form was so much
more powerful than looking at plain numbers and text. Now as a Master
Gardener, I am thrilled to see artists interpret gardening and horticultural data
into easy-to-understand graphics or what’s better known as infographics. Here
are just a few I have come across and I’m sure you've seen great examples
too.
Here is an example of a quick guide to vegetables for Harris County, Texas and their times for planting vegetables, both marginal and ideal times.
As in most plant publications, the height and width of
plants is given in numbers. But what makes this Plant Select book stand out is how they use
the drawing of a person next to a drawing of the plant to convey the plant size
in a way that is very easy to grasp without numbers. It's a very small and
simple graphic with a high impact on understanding. Durable Plants for the Garden – A Plant Select Guide 2009 by Colorado State University, Denver Botanic Gardens, and Green Industries of Colorado; Over 41 illustrators.
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| Durable Plants for the Garden – A Plant Select Guide 2009 |
The Ever Blooming Flower Garden by Lee Schneller 2009 is a masterpiece in visual depiction of a large
amount of data using very little space. It’s a treasure trove of plant
phenology information. In the plant catalog section, the author shows bloom
time, bloom color, plant height, habitat, and sun exposure in one graphic per
plant as shown below.
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| The Ever Blooming Flower Garden by Lee Schneller 2009 |
In the Plant Pallet section of the book, the charts easily
depict the same information but with the categories of time of the year and
plant height shown below. It makes it so easy to choose your preferred bloom colors
for most all the growing seasons of the year.
This past summer I was deciding which pond plants I would
buy, but the names “marginal” or “bog” meant nothing to me. I finally found
some graphical representations of a pond and where the plants grow in them as
shown below.
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| Hoffman's Waterscapes |
We all understand the concept of time with an analog clock going clockwise from 1 to 12. Graphics that show cycles use our common knowledge of a clock to portray lifecycles of plants or insects as in this example.
