Donations to
Cultivar.org's HIP encyclopedia are very much appreciated! The
donations are 100% dedicated to the following purposes:
- 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.
- 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.
- We also share stock
with major growers to help promote new, non-patented cultivars and to
preserve very rare ones.
- Seek opportunities to
work with local tissue culture labs to bring rare cultivars back to
market at affordable prices. We will not sell plants.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.