Woody Plant Web Links

The National Arboretum has many acres you can explore. The Arboretum is also the source of a number of important cultivars for this region.

The National Mall , the National Sculpture Garden, and the Tidal Basin - the location of the famed cherry trees - are great places to see effective use of trees and shrubs in landscapes.

Dumbarton Oaks in Georgetown is a fabulous place for an afternoon stroll.

Brookside Gardens has an extensive collection of woody plants that are suitable for landscape use. The combination of beautiful formal plantings and wilder areas will give you lots of creative ideas for using different plants.

Mount Vernon Estate provides a look at a traditional colonial garden.

Adkins Arboretum is a excellent stop on a trip to the Eastern Shore. They focus on plants native to Maryland.

As long as you are on the Eastern Shore, drop south to Salisbury University. The campus has been declared an Arboretum and they track over 750 different specimens representing the diversity of the plant kingdom.

Cylburn Arboretum is a 207 acre oasis within the city limits of beautiful Baltimore, MD.

Ladew Gardens north of Baltimore is known as the best topiary garden in North America.

If you don't have time to go far, you can take one of the nine walks around campus for which students last year developed guides to the trees and shrubs.

However, when the sun is down or when it is raining you can learn more about and deepen your understanding of the species we study through reading and looking at pictures. The Web links below will take you to useful sites that can supplement your study of live plants. Let me know if you find other sites that you like and I will add them to the list. I check all the links at the beginning and end of each semester. If you find that one is broken, let me know.

I have organized the links into the categories listed here. Either click on a category to jump right to those links or simply browse the page.

Plant Identification
Glossaries and Dictionaries for Plant Terms
Information on Our Local Flora
Plant Distributions
Hardiness Zones
Ornamental Plant Uses and Values in the Urban Environment
Native Plants for Use in Landscaping
Information on Invasive Species
Plant Care and Maintenance
Information on Pests and Diseases
Just Generally Interesting Information

Plant Identification

Salisbury University Arboretum has great photographs of many of the plants that we study.

The Arbor Day Foundation Key to Trees asks you a series of questions that will help you identify an unknown tree specimen. Over 250 species of trees from eastern North America are included in their key.

The Gymnosperm Database has lots of information about - you guessed it - gymnosperms!

Gymnosperms of the Southeastern United States. This site is a key to gymnosperms that are native in the southeast, it does not include many of the cultivated gymnosperms.

The Nearctica site has extensive information on conifers of North America.

The University of Connecticut has a number of plant walks on the Web. You can look at photos of plants on their walks to see examples of many of the plants we study.

Forest Tree Images from the USDA Forest Service.

Will Cook's website has great images of most of the trees we study.

The Colby College Plant Taxonomy Course Web Page has fantastic descriptions of plant families including a table and a diagram showing relationships of the families to one another. It also has a Web-based key to the families.

Dendrology at Virginia Tech. This is a great page with fact sheets on over 350 North American woody plants as well as helpful identification keys that offer an optional interview process approach to identification. The site also includes a database of big trees

University of Michigan Tree has developed an Identification Key.

Vanderbilt University also has photographs of a number of the species we study. Their site focuses on the southeast, but there is substantial overlap with our species.

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign maintains a database of woody plants suitable for the midwest. Many of these plants grow here also.

The Trees of Alabama and the Southeast Web Site is a great reference source for information on over 200 trees. As with the site from Vanderbilt, this site focuses on the southeast. You can test your identification abilities with their online quizzes (as if you didn't have enough quizzes).

Glossaries and Dictionaries for Plant Terms (Go to Top)

Glossary of tree identification terms from Shasta College.

Terminology used in tree identification from Clemson University.

Another terminology Web page this one if from the University of Wisconsin.

Meanings of the scientic names of many woody plants we study.

Dictionary of Botanical Epithets.

Information on Our Local Flora (Go to Top)

List of native plants documented from Sligo Creek Watershed by John Parrish for the Friends of Sligo Creek.

Check out this Mid-Atlantic plant identification guide developed by Charlie Davis.

Native azaleas of the east coast from the Middle Atlantic Chapter American Rhododendron Society.

The DC and Baltimore Area Flora has information on the distribution of native plants in our region. These distributions are based on collections in the District of Columbia Herbarium that is managed by the Department of Botany in the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), Smithsonian Institution.

Plant Distributions (Go to Top)

Maps of tree species distributions from the USDA Forest Service. This is the source of many of the North American tree distribution maps we use in lecture.

Data on climate variables associated with tree and shrub species distributions. Data come from the Biological Resources Division of the United States Geological Service.

This classic Silvics Manual has information on distributions and ecology of many of our native trees.

Hardiness Zones (Go to Top)

The USDA Plant Hardiness Map from the National Arboretum

The Arbor Day Foundation has an updated map of hardiness zones showing changes from the 2000 version.

Ornamental Plant Uses and Values in the Urban Environment (Go to Top)

This Technical Guide to Urban Horticulture provides detailed information on basic horticultural principles.

This guide has excellent information about the benefits of trees in the urban environment.

The University of Connecticut Plants Database is one of the best sites on the web for detailed information about ornamental plants.

The Kemper Garden Center at the Missouri Botanical Garden maintains a database containing information on ornamental values of plants. You can search by name or by ornamental characteristics.

Dave's Garden is an online gardening/plant community that also offers a lot of information. Subscriptions are only $5 for 2 months or $15 for a year, but non-subscribers can search the plant database up to 10 times a day for free. The database includes almost all of the plants and their cultivars covered in PLSC 253 and 254. There are various methods of searching the database. The site also has a downloadable search engine plug-in for those using the Mozilla Firefox browser, which is extremely convenient. It can be downloaded by going to and clicking on "Add the PF Search to your Firefox browser".

Urban Habitats is an open-access electronic journal that focuses on current research on the biology of urban areas. There are many interesting articles on the biodiversity value of urban areas.

Edible plants for landscaping from Plants for a Future in the UK.

Encyclopedia of new cultivars.

The Right Tree Handbook from the Minnesota Department of Power describes plants that are suitable for planting under utility lines.

North Carolina State's Consumer Horticulture Website has a lot of information about many plants and can be easily accessed by common name or scientific name

Selecting plants for urban areas. in the northeast from the USDA Forest Service, Penn State, and the Chicago Botanic Garden.

SelecTree Database at Cal Poly Pomona is another searchable plant database.

Native Plants for Use in Landscaping (Go to Top)

The National Wildlife Federation has developed a database of native plants in each state that can be used in landscaping.

Information on Invasive Species (Go to Top)

Important information on Invasive Species compiled by the Alien Plant Working Group of the Plant Conservation Alliance. This site has a list of all plants known to invade natural areas throughout the US that indicates in which states each species is invasive and a list of plants known to invade natural areas in the Mid-Atlantic region. You can also access a Web-based version of the National Park Service's publication, Plant Invaders of Mid-Atlantic Natural Areas. It also has fact sheets for individual species.

Local information on invasive species and about planting native species is available from the Maryland Native Plant Society and the Virginia Native Plant Society.

The Virginia Native Plant Society and the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation have compiled a list of species that are invasive in Virginia. These same species are also typically invasive in Maryland.

Invasive Species Information from The Nature Conservancy

Invasive Species Clearinghouse from Montana State University

More invasive species information from Invasive.org , a joint project of The Bugwood Network, USDA Forest Service, USDA APHIS PPQ, and The University of Georgia (Warnell School of Forest Resources, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, and Deptartment of Entomology. This is an autoritative website with excellent links.

Plant Care and Maintenance (Go to Top)

Pruning techniques

Information on Pests and Diseases (Go to Top)

Information on diagnosing plant pests and diseases from the UMD Home and Garden Center

forestpests.org has extensive information on forest pests

Hemlock Wooly Adelgid

Asian Longhorn Beetle

Emerald Ash Borer

Sudden Oak Death Syndrome

Diplodia (Sphaeropsis) tip blight of pine

Viburnum leaf beetle

Just Generally Interesting Information (Go to Top)

Urban Horticulture

International Plant Names Index

A list of the oldest trees in the world and their ages.

Tons of information about Ginkgo biloba

The Big Tree Champions of Maryland