Plant ID Miracle

A Designer's Dream Come True.

Imagine going out on a site visit in high summer to take an inventory of existing plants.  You remove a portable barcode scanner from your bag, point it at the leaf of the crabapple tree, and voila! it tells you it's an 'Adirondack' crabapple, not an 'Indian Magic.'  Likewise, when you can't remember how to distinguish an English boxwood from the common American one (the notch in the leaf) -- your handy little gadget will tell you which is which.

Perhaps the day is not too far off when the above scenario becomes reality.  Scientists at several institutions around the world are now studying ways to develop a barcode for plants by studying each plant's unique DNA sequences.

A new exhibit (through March 25th) at the US Botanic Garden (USBG) in Washington DC examines the progress that's been made so far in the quest for barcodes that can quickly identify plants.

Two years ago, the Consortium for the Barcode of Life, hosted by the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), held its first international conference on the subject in London.  The conference concluded that DNA tagging is very effective in the identification of animals, but that it had not yet been successfully demonstrated for plants. At that conference,  the NMNH announced a major project in Costa Rica to test barcoding technology on some eight thousand plant species. Scientists from the USBG and the Smithsonian Department of Botany are now doing a pilot project on developing barcodes for medicinal plants, as well as barcode readers. 

We landscape designers would be happy with a simple device that could help us identify, well -- just the plants listed in Michael Dirr's Manual of Woody Landscape Plants would be a welcome start.

(photo: courtesy US Botanic Garden)