Inventing the 'Shazam' of plants

It can be supremely irritating when you see a plant and you can’t identify it.

Unless you’re a professional horticulturalist, you must have been in that situation at one time or another, where you see a plant, and you know that you know its name, you just can’t remember what it’s called. It’s so infuriating, you know what it’s called. You've seen it loads of times before. Thingy next door has got some!

There are plants that I’ve grown in the past in previous gardens that I've spotted again in the border of a local park - like some long lost lover in a chance encounter and think… ‘Oh, there’s…’ And the name escapes me. It’s gone.*

*In this case it was Pervoskia Blue Spire.

Sometimes a little rumination will help bring the name back; a touch of the leaf, a smell of the flower, a little pondering while your brain runs a search through the convoluted corridors of memory. And when you do remember, there’s the relief that actually you can remember vaguely useful things, rather than the colour of the wrapper of Jacobs Club Fruit – when asked at a pub quiz.* *They were purple.

There are also all kinds of situations where you see plants and wish you had a handy label so you could buy some. Take the photo of this Iris-leaf-alike plant that I discovered in my garden which must have been planted by the previous owner. Unlike the Iris plants in my garden – which will only bloom for 45 minutes when I’m not there – this has extraordinary staying power and has been in bloom for a month.

After a bit of Googling I worked out that it was probably Schizostylis coccinea (or the Kaffir lily), but wouldn’t it be nice to find out on the spot?

You can do this with music. There’s a mobile phone app called ‘Shazam’ where you hold your phone up to the unidentified music source and it will analyse it and tell you what it is. Cameras are getting more and more sophisticated. It was only ten minutes ago we were wandering into Snappy Snaps clutching two film canisters of the holiday in Corfu with a vague hope that they were exposed correctly. These days everything is digital, cameras are recognizing faces, focusing themselves, adjusting exposure and then uploading everything to a Cloud somewhere.

How long will it be till some bright spark uploads a database of all the trees and plants in the world and hooks it up to a photo-analysis programme, so that you can point a mobile phone at a plant and the device will tell you what it is…? It can’t be more than ten years away.

But what to call such a worthy app? Surely name it after one of the great planter hunters. Sir William and Sir Joseph Hooker were key figures in nineteenth century plant research in Asia and the Far East and kindled the UK’s great love of rhododendrons. Naming the device ‘Hooker’ after them, though, might bring consternation and misunderstanding. ‘Especially if you scrolled through someboedy else’s phone and found one of the apps was called ‘Hooker’.

Better still, how about the botanist aboard Captain Cook’s expedition to Australia, Joseph Banks. In 1771, he brought back 1,300 new plant species from the appropriately named Botany Bay. Nobody but marsupials could recognise these. So that would be a fitting name, we could call the new device a Bansky.

And the RHS could do their own version and call it a Banksii.

FH