Looking for a hard to find plant? Looking for growing information on a specific plant? Yeah, you could do a search using Google, Yahoo, or Bing, but the results will depend on the effort put into the search engine optimization of the source’s website, assuming they even have a website.

Instead, check out the University of Minnesota’s Plant Information Online database of suppliers, wholesalers, and nurseries. As their home page says, a search of their database is a search of  “North American nurseries for 106,952 plants, find 370,432 citations to 156,910 plants in science and garden literature, link to selected websites for images and regional information about 19,131 plants, and access information on 2,647 North American seed and nursery firms.“

Yep, that’s my kind of plant database