Native Plant Society: Plants Map.com

Tony Russell

Bill Blevins will be discussing PlantsMap, a website community that hosts botanical collections with customized tools that solve the challenges of documenting, organizing, mapping, tagging and sharing information about plants. Bill Blevins is an avid plant collector who is known to try and grow anything that might survive in Zone 7. On a 2-acre lot in Spotsylvania, VA, he and his wife Tracy are growing over 1800 taxa of plants. Bill has also been an early adopter of just about every high-tech gadget that's been introduced in the past 40 years. Bill is constantly thinking about how technology can help his plants and landscape. He was trained as a photojournalist and pursue that career for 10 years but then turned his attention to the Internet in the mid 1990s and went on to run some of the largest websites in the United States. In 2014 he started PlantsMap.com and is now helping gardeners and organizations all over the world document their plant collections. Bill has collected over 300 conifers and is an active member of the American Conifer Society and servers on the non-profit committee with the National Institute of Consumer Horticulture. He is also a member of the American Rose Society, American Iris Society, American Hosta Society, Arbor Day, National Garden Bureau, American Horticultural Association and American Hort. Meet in the Education Building. Free and open to the public.