New plant website launched

Best landscaping plant tip offered

Bill Hoch has launched a new website on landscape plants of the upper Midwest United States.

The website details different landscaping plants appropriate for the area, the ideal growing conditions, how to prune, plant specifics and descriptions as well as images of individual plants. It also covers different plant types, including trees, shrubs, vines and groundcover.

In creating such a database, Hoch hopes to provide a resource for those looking to find climate and landscape appropriate plants in an easy to use format.

Hoch, an associate professor in Montana State University’s Department of Plant Sciences and Plant Pathology in the College of Agriculture at Montana State University, began developing the website while working on his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin in 2001.  At that time he was focused on the upper Midwest, which includes Wisconsin.

“It probably took me a year to get the images and information together,” Hoch said. “The intent was to provide a database of region-specific information on woody plant characteristics, cultivars and maintenance that would be usable by the homeowner and professional alike.”

The website has since been updated and was recently relaunched with a new URL, landscapeplants.org, with the intention of adding information on all regions of the country to allow users to select region-specific databases.

“The next step for me will be to create the database for the intermountain west region,” Hoch said. “I hope to begin work on this new database within the year and then focus on other areas of the U.S.”

For more information, visit: www.landscapeplants.org.