For flowering perennials, I think photographs of the garden are the best cataloging device. A series of dated photos will give you a record of plant position, height, color, bloom time and duration. I also keep a spreadsheet with variety names, characteristics, and measured height, bloom time and duration, as well as notes regarding each plant.

ha ha ha.....go on with you.

No, I know what I have and where it all is. I'm the one who planted the beds, after all. I do keep plant tags for things I may not remember the specific cultivar.

I also do make notes on my annual plantings, since those I replant every year; I notate on a piece of paper the annual combos I like, what I didn't like and why, what looks good in what pot, what ideas I have for next year, and notes on new varieties/cultivars of annuals I tried for the year.

Agree with the above -- pics are a great idea, as they enable you to see plantings as a whole, not specific plants, and how the planting evolves over the course of the season as well as year to year.

Sounds terribly logical and not something I'd want in my garden (humour...not being mean), is there a cure for it?

Seriously, I do such planting maps when I design a new bed, but unfortunately, they're never kept up to date with changes....bad me :(

It is a good thought I guess...though like the poster above, only once in a blue moon am I unable to identify something in my garden for a period of X days, before brain synapses heal or whatever.

Not trying to be pedantic :) I would not bother doing this with an established garden, but right now I'm in the early stages of building a new garden. It will take me a few years of moving plants around to get the right color combinations, with plants blooming in the right time frame and not having a tall plant blocking the view of a shorter one.

About 20 years ago I did a Gertrude Jekyll type garden on a hillside. It was easy because you could put a short plant behind a tall one but further up the hill so there was no blocking. New varieties developed since then are wonderful... very much improved. But I'm gardening on flat ground so there are some new challenges.

Huh? Am I supposed to catalogue my plants?
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Yes I do. I love making lists, so this is no chore for me. ;-)

I have a word document that I have a table drawn on. I have it organized by Genus/species/cultivar and then a brief description of appearance. I used to have another word doc for comments/care/general notes/location on each of the plants too. That took a lot more work and time than I could devote, so now I just stick to the table.
CMK

I understand the need. For years, I never saved the tags that came with plants, and now I wish I knew which cultivar certain plants were.

Starting this year, I'm saving all tags. I'm placing them in a baggie and labeling with date of purchase and place of purchase. But this will soon be problematic, because I will have too may baggies to tuck inside my garden notebook.

I've haven't figured that out yet, and I'm not one to purchase something specific to house them. So I'm waiting until I spy something around my house that might work. This could take quite awhile.

I marvel at how many posters know exactly what plant they have, when I can identify a plant as a phlox, for instance. When it's in bloom, I can even tell you which color it is!

Hmm, what a coincidence that this thread pops up today. I was just out in the garden and was flabbergasted with myself that I just could NOT remember the name of a certain hosta! I thought I could name every plant in my garden!

I went along from the beginning of the bed several times, repeating the name of each plant to myself, to see if it would jog my memory, but I still can't recall the name of this hosta - and I can see the darn thing from the window as I type! I tried to put it down to having way too many variegated hostas, but I did consider the idea of finally, after 15 or so years of gardening, of trying to get serious about putting down on paper what I have in the garden.

I just can't seem to stick with it. Maybe some of you organized folks (cough, cough CMK!) can actually SHOW us an example of your systems? That would be very helpful to us visual folks.

Dee

I've shared this before. I do keep spreadsheets and try to keep them simple and easy to update, but I still fall behind sometimes. I have some changes in the garden that have not been added to the spreadsheets at the moment.

I couldn't remember the name of every plant without them. I have done what you have done Dee, and suddenly can't remember the name of a cultivar. I am thankful I have a list to look it up on the computer. I don't have to go find the box of plant tags and go digging around in it. Or go to the stored files of receipts for what I bought 4 years ago.

The Excel spreadsheet is very searchable too.

Its awful easy to just pull up a plant online-- even if its not the specific variety I will find it pretty quick. If I temporarily forget a name its something to concentrate on like a mental game (no don't tell me, let me remember) Its like when you can't remember someones name or a movie title and have a contest to see who can remember it first.

If I need the whole latin deal, I look it up, I don't need to be that technical in my garden besides, I would never get that down the way campanula has. Or do you cheat and look it up as you're typing? Just kidding, because thats what I do when I'm not being lazy. The only time I need those is when I'm looking for new plants online when I'm piddling late night.

Like mxk3, I planted it so I know what it is or at least I should unless I had no idea at the time I planted it which has happened several times in which case I am still working on an ID while testing it out. People who carry baggies and collect seeds from everywhere have that tendency.

I'm an Excel person too, with a system similar to PrairieMoon. No way could I ever remember the details on all my plants, and I'm just one of those people that enjoys cataloging things.

I have one file that contains a tab for each garden area. I make a new version of the file for each year, just by saving it with a new file name. That way as I delete plants that are gone, I still have a record of what they were. So hypothetically at least, I can learn from my mistakes.

I think recordkeeping style is personality-driven. It can be done with pictures, maps, spreadsheets, tags, or just memory. Definitely do what feels good to you!

Perennials: our garden for last seven years:

Draw sketches of all plantings, dated and with an approximate garden location. Arrange these by date, within approximate garden locations. Dispose of individual sketches as plants die or are removed.

Take a lot of pictures of the garden and also of individual plants through the growing season. Use i-photo. Trash pictures no longer required for cultivar identification or for review.

Keep one of every plant label, arranged alphabetically in envelopes. Relegate labels of deceased or removed plants to a secondary file.

Nice Excel Spreadsheet, Karin! And I just learned something from your spreadsheet. I haven't had room to make all the comments I've wanted to, so I've been adding extra rows under the name of a plant to do that. That disrupts my searches too. Duh! All I had to do was expand the row.

Karin, I don't have a separate document for each section of the garden, because if you have a column that lists the location of the plant, you can do a sort in Excel that arranges the plants by location, or any other criteria you want to arrange them in. I list the date planted so I can search to get a chronological list. Or find out which plants I bought at such and such a nursery, etc.

I like to have just one document to search and I keep plants that are no longer in the garden on the list with the designation of 'dead' or 'given away' so I can sort by all the missing plants or if I sort by location, the old plants will appear in that section with the designation 'dead' etc. Since my property is only 1/4 of an acre, it's not a huge unwieldy document. I suppose if I had 5 acres, that would change.

The only other document I keep is a daily garden journal which I do create annually. I use an Excel spreadsheet for that with the simple format of one column for one day. I also add photos to it as I go along as well. Again, the most useful feature of that is the search function. Anything about the garden is in that document, like a list of plants to use, a work to do list, an order at a nursery, etc. So I only have one place to look for the information I need.

I should have said that like CMK and Karin, I actually do enjoy keeping records this way. Not everyone does. To me it is a vast improvement over any previous system I've had. Another reason I like to have it, is I can pass along the information and I can print it out for a hard copy if I want to. But if I didn't enjoy keeping records, I might try to just use my photo library as a catalog and just take a lot of photos and add a lot of info about the plant to the photo description. Whatever works for you.

Excel Spreadsheets have limitations. If you are really serious you should use a database. Lol.
I've never thought about keeping lists of plants in the garden. Though I started keeping a list when I started growing orchids it soon was discarded. Slack!.
All the orchids (1000) of them have plant tags, the only problems there are senior moments when repotting and no data for lists.
I do have an orchid society results list with 20,000 entries in a database, that is the basis for my statement re. Databases are better than excel though there are excel people out there who are in the genius category.
Anyway, gardening is supposed to be fun. Cheers.

I have a journal where I have all my plants listed. My vines are listed, name and where they are planted. Under Heuchera, the names of all of them are listed. Same with Hostas and the rest of my perennials. I also keep my plant tags.
In the back of the journal I keep notes on the plants. I also keep notes on my vegetable garden.

i have done the SSheet

but i have found.. that taking pix.. and then changing the file names to the latin not only forced me to learn latin names... but also made searching for the pix supremely easy ...

after i take some pix.. i change the file name to something such as this:

Picea pungens 'Sunshine' 20140707 0001 ...

20140707 .. the date supplied by the uploading program

and the 001 being a random sequential number.. generated by the camera ... in case i took more than one pic in a given day ...

so when i want pix of my yellow flushing blue spruce... and use the WINDOWS SEARCH ... searching by the latin name .... i can pull up every pic of that plant for ten years... its like a baby album.. to watch it grow in front of my eyes ...

another upside is that i can take two pix.. one for location ... and one close up ... so i can eyeball where it is.. rather than relying on mapping or trying to assign location codes... which sooner or later.. become unmanageable ...

ken

For the most part, I don't particularly care about keeping track of names so a detailed spreadsheet is just too much work :-) I do keep the plant tags though, so if I do want to look up a name, I can look at the tag. The tags from things planted each year collect in a box which I sort and file in the winter when I need a dose of gardening :-) Sometimes I forget by then where I put a particular plant! I have two binders - one for the front garden and one for the backyard. Each binder has sections for the individual garden beds. I use those plastic pages meant for sports card collections to put the tags in, and add a small notecard behind the tag giving the year it was planted and any additional location info that might be useful. I'm a visual person so it's much easier for me to flip through the relevant section of a binder looking at the pictures on the tags to quickly find what I'm looking for than it would be to find it on a spread sheet.

I also take lots of pictures through the seasons. My Picturetrail albums are organized by garden area and by years. I add the date to the title of each picture there. Also, the pictures stored on my home computer are organized by year and month, with each picture tagged by garden area and year so I can easily use my photo software to find a picture something by scrolling through pictures from the relevant area. It only takes a few seconds to tag the photos when uploading them from the camera.

I'm basically lazy :-) so organization systems for me have to be fast and easy!

My tag binders look like this:
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I very much agree with Ken that photos are extremely useful for keeping track of plants in perennial beds over time.

Certain things also intervene to simplify record keeping: for instance (in our case) lily beetles, so lilies/toadlilies/ fritillaria gone. Coneflower rosette mite: I've eliminated affected plants and almost stopped buying more echinacea.

It also seems cost effective to concentrate on cultivars of perennials which one finds longer-lived. Longer-lived plants like peonies and some balloon flower cultivars are easier to keep track of than perennials that only hang around for 3 or 4 years.

Deliberately avoiding seeders (and deadheading) and runners helps: Many perennials, left to themselves, do move around year-to-year. Degenerate offspring of attractive plants can also complicate identification.

I find weeding and cutting back aids in knowing what's at the soil surface in earlier spring and later fall.

In addition, it sometimes seems unnecessary to have many (slightly) different cultivars of a particular plant. Sometimes one cultivar seems more attractive than many others (e.g. for me, 'Fascination' for Culver's root).

On the other hand with our many garden phlox cultivars, it's lots of sketches (have to also cover division and moving cultivars) and photographs. But they're worth it!

I made a catalog of sorts for all my clematis so I can easily identify which ones need which type of pruning. Otherwise I go crazy trying to keep them all straight and I have only begun my clematis obsession.

I also have a tag binder where I taped the tags to sheet protectors but now that I've seen woodyoak using those baseball card sleeves I'm going to do that! I like having the tags so I can look things up later if I need to or if I want to buy a second one I make sure I get the right one. :o)

There is nothing easier than planting that plastic plant tag underground (I usually place it at 7 or 10 o'clock). That way, when I move it next time, there should be enough of the tag left to verify. Now I also put metal tags above ground, and then write the name on an index card, which gets brought back to the computer for the SS. I also draw maps, which are never up to date. If the metal tag gets lost or destroyed you can also dig the tag back up.

dave

I too keep a tag binder like woodyoak. Mine are divided by blooming season.

In fact I just found a misplaced bag of tags....now it will be complete :)

Simple and easy way for me to keep track.

I have 3 ring binders where I place the tag and a page on which I list the name, both common and latin names with separate pages for each and each alphabetized. Sometimes I can't remember one of the names but can remember the other. On the common name page I note, see "the latin name" so don't have to write the same info twice.

On the page I include the date and place plant was acquired and cost, if applicable. Then the growing conditions, any foliage and/or flower details. Suggestions for companion plantings. Also a note on where the plant is in the gardens.

Each year I make a notation on how the plant did that year. Often this is during a down time, hot summer day, late fall, winter, etc. These notes are very short, ie: good bloom, excellent growth, move next spring, needs dividing etc.

I started this when I first started the gardens because there were so many plants that I did not know. It sounds like a lot of work but done a few plants at a time over years it hasn't been.

With most of my yard now mixed perennial gardensI have lots of plants and so I have lots of binders. One whole bookshelf full.

I have old drawings of my beds and slips here and there of changes made. Keep thinking I will update the drawings in the winter but haven't done so in the last two years. Getting slower, and I've always been slow, in my old age.

The spreadsheet sounds like a good idea but lots of work to input. And I'm not good at spreadsheets. I can never get the spacing correct. Think I need someone to help me get started.

I'm taking photos of most of the plantings, all of them new (less than 2 years). Like Ken and others, I change the photo name to something more meaningful. I have electronic copies of most of my purchases which helps me to keep track of when something was bought and planted. I buy the occasional plant on impulse when I see a good bargain. I leave tags in the ground but they are often removed by weather or wildlife.

Our garden and open space will change a lot over the next couple of years as some things do well and others fail, so I'm not bothering to make drawings which is what I did in my past gardens. I had to redo these every year which was a PITA. At some point I'll sketch out the layout of plantings once they are more or less stable. That will help future owners.

We did this when leaving the Midwestern garden which was a 10-year project involving multiple beds in different areas. We also left extensive notes, garden catalogs and tools. I don't know if this is useful. Most people like the look of attractive plantings, but don't want to take on the work.

Cheryl

I had cataloged all my seeds (how to germinate, can they be WS'd, how do they grow as far as color, height, width, sun exposure, bloom time, etc). When my old computer dropped dead it took my seed catalog with it.
I have graphing paper that I draw out the beds and try to draw in the plants, to scale as best I can, but I don't always update. Actually one particular area is nothing like what I've drawn out. I just try to have something written down by the end of fall so I know whats popping up in the spring.

Best of luck to you!

Thanks for sharing! What great ideas from you all.

I have to say that I too, am leaning toward Shadyoak's system--I like the instant visual.

I'll also draw pics of the beds and take pics on my phone.

Now. Off to source sport card holders!

I'm another one who uses photos. I like to have shots of individual shots of plants as well as distance for the overall look of the bed as well as a few showing the plant next to its neighbors for easy identification of location.

Eventually, they get uploaded to my web space where they are sorted by individual garden bed by month,

I also keep plant tags. Nowadays, I start a new manila envelope each spring with the year written on it. Makes it easy to know when I planted something.

I don't attempt to map the garden because I move things way too often. I did start out with a drawing of the property that was drawn to scale and had sun/shade patterns added to it. That has proved to be a valuable investment of time. It has saved me a lot of time over the years to be able to keep referring back to it. And I enjoyed doing it.

Even with planting sketches, plant labels and photographs, detective work is sometimes necessary.

Yesterday:
Iris below in our Front North (bed).
Planting record sketch (from 2012) says 'Silver Edge' (Siberian iris).
But it's not a siberian iris; it's a Japanese iris.

The plant had been potted by me, supposedly after a division of 'Silver Edge' planted in Back Deck West.

Checked my plant label envelope for Iris ensata. It could be I. ensata 'Jodlesong' or I. ensata 'Royal Banner'; probably the former. Further images on-line also suggested the former, but was not sure.

Planting sketch Back Deck West (from 2007) says 'Jodlesong' was planted right next to Iris sibirica 'Silver Edge'. Photographs from subsequent years clearly show 'Silver Edge' flowering in situ, but no flowering 'Jodlesong'.

It's now evident what happened. I dug the 'Jodlesong' up with the 'Silver Edge' by mistake and potted it all as 'Silver Edge'.

I now feel it accurate to say that we have I. ensata 'Jodlesong' in the picture below.

After reading these posts, I am wondering how much a person's temperament and personality type determines how they approach gardening. I'd never thought about this before but I'm becoming convinced it plays a large role. Saving plant tags reminds me of scrap-booking, an occupation which is very popular with many people who have an avid interest in consolidating & organizing various subjects in that way. Plant tags don't have much information beyond plant name, planting instructions, mature plant size and sun/shade preference so I toss them since they've served their purpose. It would have never dawned on me to put them in a scrap book or create a log with a list of plants and dates.

My "diagram" is achieved by looking out from a second story window where I can visually study the overall scheme from above and plan changes I envision.

Most of my plants did not come with tags so if I did make a book, it would not reflect my garden because I am a seeds/trades/cuttings type of gardener. I design in my head trying to create the final vision I see and this is the challenge. I invite repeats for mass and naturalizing created spontaneously by the garden itself for cohesion, the plants often choose their own spots for the better. My job is often a matter of selectively thinning rather than adding but I enjoy doing this.

Usually I purchase a plant with the idea of obtaining material with which to start a colony by way of seed or cuttings for adding texture & color. Sometimes I purchase a plant intended to be focal plant for contrast but not often since the bones were established years ago and the names and characteristics of these plants are known to me without mental effort or need to reference. An overall natural balance is what I am after and I intervene accordingly. The garden is continually evolving and changing, one year often differs from the year previous in what dominates so its a very organic approach which fits my temperament and need for escape from the confinement of rules and control in most other aspects of life.

A good plant encyclopedia is an adequate reference source containing the brief information found on a plant tag for my own purposes. It is interesting to read about the approach others take to achieve their goals. There are no rigid rules to this, its individual.

Well Texas Ranger, I don't think my bookkeeping technique is really a product of my personality. I am by nature a very messy and spontaneous personality. That trait has resulted in some big gardening mistakes in the past, like digging up and discarding the roots of much valued perennials. So I am forced to adopt a more structured recording style. I'm still spontaneous but I have a bit more discipline in keeping up with what is where. And records of color and height aid my less than perfect memory. For me, just a matter of necessity. :)

I used to know the names of all my plants but I'm forgetting them! I learned the Latin when I began gardening, now I feel I need to know them! I don't lose sleep over it, though.

I also want to know for the sake of others who ask about particular plants. Uh....uh...it's on the tip of my tongue!

I'm heavily considering retiring so this is just one of the goals on my many lists...wherever they all are! LOL!

Thanks for the interesting conversations!