Missouri Botanical Garden Plant Finder

The Missouri Botanical Garden Plant Finder is a database of plants focusing on gardening and landscaping use in the St. Louis, Missouri area.

Website: https://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/PlantFinder/PlantFinderSearch.aspx

The Missouri Botanical Garden (MOBOT) is a botanical garden located in St. Louis, MO. MOBOT also has an herbarium which is the second-largest in the U.S., after that of the New York Botanical Garden. MOBOT maintains a Plant Finder database, which focuses on plants growing in the MOBOT display gardens; as these gardens are quite extensive and diverse, the database has a vast array of plants, with nearly 3,000 species of plants. Although the database has a regional focus, it is one of the most comprehensive resources on the web, and the location and climate of St. Louis being central and thus close to the average conditions in much of the eastern U.S. makes the database useful over a broad area.

MOBOT's Plant Finder lists individual varieties not just for species, but also for specific named cultivars of many species, and occasionally subspecies, named varieties, or other groupings. As such it has thousands more records than it does species. However, we link only to their species page.

The information on MOBOT's site focuses on a plant's use in gardening and landscaping, and there is only minimal information on a plant's habitat and occurrence in the wild. Information on growing conditions tends to be most applicable in the climate and regions close to St. Louis, although in many cases the text of each article does note something about a plant's range and its ability to survive and thrive in more distant areas.

Articles tend to cover basics such as a plant's ideal light, moisture, and soil conditions, as well as its ability to survive adverse conditions or stressors including pollution, soil compaction, flooding, drought, or deer browsing.