Goals and legacy of the former GreenPlantSwap web service

GreenPlantSwap was an online platform for plant growers. Built around a database of 21,000 plant records, and using location data, it helped them research, record and exchange the plants they grew.

The site was launched in March 2013 by founder Jeremy Wright, and operated for seven years to July 2020.

Besides being a service for gardeners and plant specialists, GreenPlantSwap had ambitions to help address the alarming declines in plant diversity.

The facts are stark. Within a generation, for example:

97% of wildflower meadows have gone
93% of food seed varieties have been lost
Each day some 80,000 acres of rainforest are destroyed, along with 135 different plant, animal and insect species

Plants are disappearing at such a rate because people know and care so little about them. For many, in our increasingly urban, commercially driven world, they just seem irrelevant.

Yet we owe so much to plants. Food, clothing, shelter and medicine; the oxygen we breathe; most of the energy we use; much of the beauty we enjoy in our world. Neither we, nor any other living creatures, would be here but for plants. They are vital to our livelihood. They make us happy!

How do we show our gratitude? We take plants for granted and abuse them. We cause biodiversity loss through pollution, urbanisation, intensive agriculture, destruction of forests, climate change and more.

Since 2000, the WWF estimates 1.9m square km of natural habitat have been lost, equivalent to roughly 8x the area of the UK

Things are so bad, Kew estimates one in five of the world's plant species are at risk of extinction and the damage we do may permanently harm our world and ourselves.

The work of Kew and other botanical gardens with seed banks and research is critical. However, like zoos they do not have the resource to grow living species at scale.

So what can any one of us do about it? Very little you might think. But positive action can start at home … and in your garden.

Nature is a gift we can all share. In our connected internet world, the actions of one person multiplied by others creates the global phenomena of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and more social networks yet to emerge.

What if people started recording the plants they grew and freely exchanged them with one another? We could begin to map, track and boost the fortunes of at risk plants.

A fine example of this is Wollemia nobilis. The Wollemi pine, as it is known, had been thought extinct and was known only through fossils dating back 200m years. That was until a single stand of the trees was discovered by a forest ranger in a steep-sided sandstone gorge in New South Wales in 1994. The tree’s fortunes have since been reversed by releasing successful clones of the tree into the garden retail market. Gardeners around the world now grow the Wollemi pine and its future looks secure.

Unfortunately, GreenPlantSwap itself did not have the resource to scale this hugely ambitious programme. But its sizeable plant database has now found a promising new home at Candide Gardening.

We hope and trust Candide will make further substantive progress sharing plant knowledge and helping the plants of the world through those who show most interest. The need is urgent.