How to Edit your Garden Data

Updating Your Garden Profile

To get started, go to www.bgci.org /garden_search and use the search to locate your garden.

At the side of your garden's profile click the ‘Edit Garden’ button – and login.

If you haven't got a login please complete the garden editor application form to create an account. We will send you a username and password so you can begin.

Once you have received your user name and password, you can update your garden's online information by following the instructions below:

Return to your garden's profile in the garden search

To the right of the page, locate and click on the "Edit This Garden" button:

Enter the username and password you received in the email from us. (Your user name is most likely to be your email address)

Review and update if necessary the 'Contact and Staff Details' including address details and web address, then click 'Save and Continue’.

Use the left hand navigation bar to review and update the other categories such as ‘Research Programmes’ and ‘About this Garden’. You can come back as often as you like and fill it in bit by bit or update information.

After you have made any updates click the ‘Save and Continue’ button at the bottom of the page. You can Preview how it will look to the public using the 'Preview Garden' link on the left hand menu.

Images of your garden can be uploaded for display on your public profile page, simply click on ‘Photo Manager’ in the left hand menu and source the images from your own computer.

After you have added the images, click the ‘update fields’ button at the bottom of the page.

Adding Your Plant Records Via Your Garden Entry

Contributing your garden’s plant lists is a valuable contribution to the monitoring of Target 8 of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation.

Your plant collection will also be cross referenced against the threatened plant lists and you can obtain a report of your unique holdings. The information is used to inform policy on plant diversity conservation worldwide and to allow networking opportunities for conservation.

How to Add or UpdateYour Plant Records

While editing your garden data in the database, you can also upload, replace or append your garden’s plant holdings.

This is done by cutting and pasting a CSV (coma separated values) file, holding plant name information only.

A Microsoft Excel file can be saved as a CSV file by selecting ‘CSV (comma delimited)’ as the option under ‘Save as Type’ in the ‘File - Save As’ menu.

Adding plant records

To add plant records, select ‘Plant upload’ from the menu on the left, and follow the instructions.

Seven fields only are required (abbreviations of field names taken from ITF2 Standard Field Names (1998):

Genus Hybrid (genhyb)
Genus Name (gen)
Species Hybrid (sphyb)
Species Name (sp)
Infraspecific rank (isprk)
Infraspecific epithet (isp)
Cultivar name (cul)

As a CSV file, this would be written as: genhyb,gen,sphyb,sp,isprk,isp,cul

Any field can hold a blank value, which will be recorded as a comma (which indicates to the computer programme to move to the next field).

If you only have genus and species name, the record would be written as:

-,gen,-,sp,-,-,-

With the blanks (-) removed, the record would be ,gen,,sp,,,

So the plant list might look like:

,Abronia,,turbinata,,,
,Abronia,,villosa,,,
,Acacia,,asepala,,,
,Acacia,,blakelyi,,,
,Acacia,,bussei,,,
,Acacia,,carens,,,
,Acacia,,circummarginata,,,
,Acacia,,cuneifolia,,,
,Acacia,,filifolia,,,
,Acacia,,paolii,,,
,Acacia,,stereophylla,,,

Your plant list is added to by clicking on either ‘Append to plant list’ or ‘Replace current plant list’

You can review your garden plant holdings by clicking on ‘View your current plant list’. At that point, erroneous records can be deleted by clicking the box in the ‘delete’ column and clicking on ‘delete selected’ at the bottom of the table.

Updating plant list

New records can be added to an existing list by appending a new list to a current list – as above.

Alternatively, you can download your current plant list as a CSV file and add new records to the CSV file.

To do this, click on ‘Download your current plant list as CSV’.

This will open your plantlist as a text file. This file should be named plantlist.csv and saved as a text file.

Once the .csv file extension is present, the file can then be opened as a spreadsheet showing the records in the correct column format. The columns called ‘2004_redlist’ and ‘1999_redlist’ should be deleted before new records are added to this list.

The updated list can then be added to the database by clicking on ‘Replace current plant list’

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