Plant Inventory

The Arboretum's plant database is maintained and updated by Hoyt Arboretum Curator, Martin Nicholson and several highly qualified volunteers.

Much of the value of the Arboretum’s trees and collections are invisible to the naked eye.  When you look at one of the Arboretum’s dawn redwoods (Metasequoia glyptostroboides), you may see a tree that you’ve already seen in other gardens around town.   However, the Arboretum’s trees have pedigree, meaning that they were grown from seeds collected in the wild and the Arboretum has documentation on where and when the seeds were collected.  This means that scientists wanting to do research on native dawn redwoods, for example,  which are otherwise found only in a small, remote valley in central China, can use Hoyt’s trees for data and specimens. 

To maintain the pedigree of the plants, Hoyt Arboretum has kept records continuously since the first seeds were propagated in the Parks’ Mt. Tabor nursery beginning sometime around 1914.  Early records were kept on index cards.   A dedicated volunteer, Oliver Dalton, converted these records to a computerized database in the early 80’s. 

In 2002, a grant from the Stanley Smith Horticultural Trust enabled Hoyt Arboretum to convert the records from the by then antiquated database to a more modern one which is easier to use by the Parks staff and the volunteers who continue to play an essential role in the Arboretum's collection record-keeping.  

As of today, approximately 8,000 plants have been added.  Each entry contains information (if available) on family, genus, species, common name, variety, clutivar, provenance and specific location in the Arboretum.  The database allows the user to search for plants by family genus, species, common name and location in the Arboretum.

Although initially designed as an in-house plant management tool, there has been increasing demand for information on the plant collection by the scientific, educational, and public garden community.  Hoyt Arboretum Friends will seek funds in 2006-2007 to transfer the entire database to the Internet to better serve these constituencies.