Donations to Cultivar.org's HIP encyclopedia are very much appreciated! The donations are 100% dedicated to the following purposes:
  1. Purchase of new, rare plants to be studied, scanned and photographed for the free, public files. This can be costly, especially with imported and very rare taxa. 
    1. Plants we cannot maintain over time are donated to collections including certified botanic gardens, arboreta, and universities. We are members of the VarCon Project which seeks to conserve rare and endangered garden (including "heirloom") cultivars and distribute them to organizations with the resources for long-term propagation and perservation of live material. 
    2. We also share stock with major growers to help promote new, non-patented cultivars and to preserve very rare ones. 
    3. Seek opportunities to work with local tissue culture labs to bring rare cultivars back to market at affordable prices. We will not sell plants.
  2. Reasonable, very frugal travel to out-of-state nurseries and notable plant collections for the purpose of obtaining images and new living stock. When the pandemic permits we hope to visit the U.S. Botanic Garden and Longwood collections to add hundreds of new images. Ten other trips are planned for Spring 2021 for gardens already open by ticket reservation.
  3. Purchase of research journals, articles, and books necessary to understand correct identification, cultivar-level description, and nomenclature. We visit libraries and borrow to avoid this when possible. Digital resources are used also but some valuable material is locked up by journal and book publishers for decades. Plant societies too require dues and we like to work with several of the best to stay current on all aspects of houseplants. Cultivar.org has long "abstracted" and shared data from paid or pay-wall journals with our users and subcribers as the task of keeping up with literature is time-consuming and daunting, but also transformational and enlightening.
  4. In the long term, we hope to fund some DNA analysis of difficult genera and the clarification of hybrid parentage, species affinities, and separation of resemblant cultivars.