The internet can?t replace a nursery, but it can make plant shopping much easier Megan Hansen is a self-described "plant nerd."
"My favorite thing to do in the world is to go to the nursery," she says. In 2009, Hansen, a user experience consultant based in Portland, Oregon, merged her love for gardening with her tech background to found Plant Lust, an online encyclopedic guide for plants. The site started as a spreadsheet that Hansen was creating for her own reference.
"Then I just decided, we should all have this database," Hansen says. "We should all have a nice website that's easy to use and that doesn't feel like you have to know a lot of Latin to be able to ogle plants."
The site's tagline is "a seriously simple search for plants," and on it, users can search 78 plant catalogs, browse by plant types (like tree, shrub, etc.), and refine their results by zones and growing requirements. More recently, Hansen added a shopping feature, which will eventually tap the inventory of 100 independent nurseries around the country to deliver their goods with the click of a button. Hansen started Plant Lust because she found online plant shopping "harder than it should be," she says. And while shopping online doesn?t replace visiting nurseries in person, it does make it so that many more plants are available at our fingertips, no matter where you?re typing. "We just want people to fall in love with plants and spre...