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The Tucson Gardener |
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In the Garden Calendar
Local Garden Links
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Losing the Flowers Among the Weeds I found a site not too long ago that I added to The Tucson Gardener's local garden links section. Filled with photographs and information on native plants around the Tucson area the site was put up by a self proclaimed naturalist and photographer. By the time I went back to double check the link the site was gone. I kept going back to make sure it wasn't a temporary problem with the Web site host but it seemed as if the site had disappeared - probably forever. Then I tried revisiting a bookmarked page put up by a tomato growing aficionado who not only posted his own hard earned tomato knowledge but he'd also gone to the trouble to link to other sites that could supply additional tomato growing information. Darned if that site hadn't shriveled up and died as well. Finally I surfed over to one of those Web sites that seems to list all the garden links known to mankind. I clicked on a few links that looked interesting and each site came up missing. About that time I started hearing Peter, Paul and Mary singing "Where have all the flowers gone" in my head. A lot of easy access and often useful information had disappeared. Yes, there are still lots of gardening sites on the web especially some of those put up by hobbyists who've gone out of their way to show and share what they've accomplished. No, it's not always easy to find a site because it's hard to get indexed by some of the search engines. And while the site may be listed on a search engine one week it could very well be delisted the next. This Web site, The Tucson Gardener, has come and gone on many of the search engines on more than one occasion. And then who wants to scroll through the thousands of listings that a search can come up with? There's no doubt the Internet has become a commercial tool where businesses are hoping to sell their products to the vast audience available to them through the world wide web. There's nothing wrong with that and I'm guilty of ordering a few garden related products over the Internet because it was quick, easy, and the price was right. The number of Web sites will continue to grow and companies will continue trying to capture your attention long enough to get you to visit their site and buy their products. We can only hope that new flowers will germinate on the web to replace those one of a kind that were lost. The hard part for web surfing gardeners will be finding the really useful sites among all the weeds. (2000) |
Lying in the debris are a bunch of commercial sites that claim
to offer free garden information. Much of the information is hard to find among the
advertisements on the pages. Those blinking, blasting, bombastic ad banners can get down
right annoying. Unfortunately it's not just a few weeds mixed in with the flowers -- there
are far more weeds.