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Wednesday, February 2, 2022

Gardening Infographics by Nancy Shepard

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.

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.

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.

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.