Coming up roses on the net

The internet is great for providing information, and it's pretty good for letting you buy things, so you might expect that online gardeners would be well served. There are plenty of sites, but the quality of most are, to put it very politely, compost.

How does your garden grow?
I first thought I might be in trouble when I checked out the internet mags in my local newsagent. Not one of the spring issues featured a gardening site on the cover and in fact I couldn't find a single gardening article in any of them.

Frankly, this baffled me. Isn't gardening one of the most popular leisure pastimes in this country? OK, I know that gardening site users be might a few decades older than the average hip surfer, but come on guys (and it is mostly guys) you really could do with thinking a bit above your navels.

Eventually I was forced to go trudging through UK directories and search engines. After many hours of hard surfing I have to say I have failed to find a single high quality UK gardening site.

Altavista lists more than 200,000 UK sites including the word garden. Yahoo similarly lists thousands in a frighteningly confusing spread of sub-directories.

The best bet for whiling away an hour or two online are the specialist gardening directories. There must be about a thousand of these. I suspect that during the winter, gardeners have nothing better to do than look at each other's websites.

A good example is www.gardenlinks.ndo.co.uk which has links in about every topic from tools and equipment through to indoor gardening. Another site - www.uk.gardenweb.com - is better looking but ultimately not as useful, while www.gardening-sites.swinternet.co.uk is ugly but useful. Finally, in this grab-all grouping, I would suggest www.gardenersworld.com. It's a bit chaotic on the design front, but it has some useful leads. (By the way it is not related to the venerable BBC radio programme, of which more later.)

Keep off the grass
There is virtually nothing you cannot turn up by following links on these sites. My favourite accidental discovery was www.predatorpee.com, a US site offering urine from foxes, bobcats and coyotes to help prevent unwelcome intrusions into your garden. If anyone is suffering from persistent cat problems, a quick dash of wolf pee around the roses might do the job!

For professional gardening sites, I found nothing that came close to the US examples. They are worth a look and many have climate charts so you can discover amazingly useful things like whether Woking is more like New York or San Francisco. I particularly liked the Virtual Garden at www.vg.com, and the www.garden.com site shows what can be achieved, even if it is perhaps a little too 'commercial'.

Of the UK's general gardening sites the best is probably www.e-garden.co.uk. It provides some useful tips and has an email advice service that looks like a good idea. All of the sites I found seem to assume a fairly good degree of knowledge, so novices beware. In its monthly tips section, e-garden suggested pruning roses. Sadly, it did not link this into other general information on pruning. However, there was no advice for novice gardeners at all. I would still have no idea how to prune my roses if I had to rely on this site. In general, what advice there is seems incredibly sparse. The shopping service was a bit of a disappointment too. E-garden is OK, but it still has a long way to go.

The other 'good' site - and I use that term very grudgingly is www.gardening365.co.uk. Until recently this was called British Gardening Online. It has a rather flaky but fun plant selector, a pretty dreadful diary system and a completely useless 'friend or foe' gardening quiz. It does have a pretty good buy, sell and swap notice board, and a reasonably lively discussion area where you can sort out problems with other gardeners, but overall it is very unattractive.

It does not have to be like this. While it is a bit light on content, www.hortus-ornamenti.co.uk is a wonderfully sumptuous and sensual site. Beautifully designed and with the great use of small photographs, the only sadness is that there is not more on it.

Hortus Ornamenti designs and produces hand made gardening tools and accessories, and also sells gifts. As it says on the site, "Our aim is to produce simple, beautifully made and very practical gardening items for avid gardeners wishing to treat themselves, their family or their friends - whatever the occasion." It is certainly a good site to visit if you are looking for a gift for the gardener who has everything.

Auntie's bloomers
The place I expected to find lots of easy to access information was the BBC site. The Corporation has a richly deserved reputation for the quality of its sites, but I was sorely disappointed. The www.bbc.co.uk/gardening site is dreadful. Not only was the actual content quite thin, but finding specific information was not at all easy. Some basic design errors meant that it is easy to miss the gardening section altogether if you are not careful.

The site is divided up by programmes with, not surprisingly, Ground Force having the most information. While there was no really basic stuff (I am still waiting to find out how to prune roses), much of the content is useful. The best thing on the site is the lively home and garden message forum where all sorts of useful discussions were going on.

The obvious bastion of British gardening excellence, the hugely popular Gardeners' World programme, is shunted off to beeb.com, the BBC's commercial arm. This seems a damn cheek. The site, www.gardenersworld.beeb.com, seems very commercial - this is, after all, the extension of a Radio 4 programme. To add insult to injury, the 'Back to Basics' section, where I might finally have found out how to prune roses, did not work, and on 30 March, the discussion forum had been closed for an "upgrade". The notice when I visited the site said the new improved "Gardeners' World Forum Service will be launched mid-March, 2000". It is nice for us web builders to see that even the BBC can fall into the "we are ready to launch soon" trap. Nice for me, but unprofessional for people visiting the site.

The site encourages visitors to join the Gardeners' World Webclub - "a friendly group of fellow gardeners". With this you get a weekly email from "one of your favourite celebrity gardeners, and in the future you can look forward to exclusive offers for Webclub members". Then there is "Buy it with beeb.com - your chance to buy books, videos and other products from the BBC Shop". So this is what we pay our licence fee for. In a nutshell, the site is about as good as any of the commercial sites and it has totally failed to use the fantastic resources the BBC has at its disposal.

My final hope was the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS). The incredibly Spartan, but incredibly fast, www.rhs.co.uk tells you basically what plants will grow where. That's it - nothing else. Whether this is part of the RHS site is impossible to tell, but it is one of the tidiest you are ever likely to visit.

The main site - www.rhs.org.uk - is without doubt the most frustrating site on the web. "The RHS Plant Finder exists to put enthusiastic gardeners in touch with suppliers of plants, many of them unusual. There are over 70,000 plants in the RHS Plant Finder, a list compiled and updated annually from the catalogues of over 800 UK nurseries." Sounds great doesn't it? Until you realise you can only use the Latin names of plants. If you're clever, elsewhere on the site you may find a translation from a common name into Latin, but the database itself is entirely in Latin. One or two nurseries have sites that are linked, but for most the RHS just gives the address. No phone numbers, just the address.

Sowing the seeds
I shall end with a couple of pearls I found along the way. The National Gardens Scheme - www.ngs.org.uk - raises money for nursing and caring charities by opening gardens to the public. It is an excellent, simple site that quickly lets you see which gardens are open when in your area, so you can see how the professionals do it.

Finally, www.thompson-morgan.com has an excellent, no nonsense seed and plant catalogue site. Prices seem reasonable and delivery charges bearable for plants. They have lovely touches. For example, Poppy Coral Reef - "this year's Flower of the Year" - was so popular that the company had sold out of seeds. The site has a notice inviting customers to submit their email addresses so they can be told when new stocks arrive for sowing next year. It's a great service and customer loyalty is bound to be high.

Gardening advice on the web in the UK obviously has a long way to go. Part of the problem is the huge wealth of amateur sites available. This seems to have discouraged innovators from creating a good, comprehensive gardening site. Hopefully, in the next 12 months, the market will mature and some more comprehensive sites will develop. In the meantime I am going to stay indoors. With www.bonsaisite.com I am learning how to grow miniature trees in pots. Maybe I'll prune the roses next year.