An Exploratory Research Study of Collection Management Tools for the Knoxville Botanical Gardens and Arboreta’s Living Plant Collection

The Knoxville Botanical Gardens and Arboreta was formed in 2001 to purchase the C.B. Howell and Joe N. Howell Nurseries with the intent of forming botanical gardens and an arboretum in the Knoxville, Tennessee area. The two nurseries combined have a long history in the nursery industry and a collection of trees and shrubs worth preserving for the future gardens. The board of directors instantly recognized that the nurseries had several unusual, specimen size plants, but they did not know exactly what they had or where it was located. The board felt that it was important to identify all the plant material on site and to create a record of the plant collection before they could start developing gardens. The records I have created will assist the master planner when deciding what plant material should be preserved. A current trend in botanical institutions is to move from a card catalog record system to a computerized record system. There are two common software systems that have emerged for woody and non-woody plant collections. BG-BASE is a prefabricated software system with botanical information built-in, but is very expensive to purchase and maintain. Microsoft Access is the other most common computerized record option. MS Access is relatively inexpensive, but requires building the system yourself. In this research study, I looked at what should be required in a living plant record system based on the garden’s mission and built a plant record database in Microsoft Access and ArcMap in ArcGIS. Then, I tested the usefulness if the MS Access database using the data collected from KBGA’s living plant collection. Using the database made in v MS Access, I was able to answer the board’s questions – what plants do we have and where are they located? Hopefully, by publishing the steps taken for creating a plant records database, other botanical institutions will have a guide to model their own plant system. Providing an alternative to BG-BASE could be especially helpful for botanical institutions with a limited financial budget. Botanical collections are the basis for having a garden, and being able to maintain adequate records about the collection is very important for establishing value of the collection and building a positive reputation.