Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of garden plants


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was no consensus and with policy based input on both sides, it does not appear a consensus is forthcoming. Star  Mississippi  03:01, 25 May 2022 (UTC)

List of garden plants

 * – ( View AfD View log | edits since nomination)

Prodded by and endorsed on talk by  and, deprodded by. An unsourced list of over 2000 context-free genus names doesn't seem to be very informative or useful for navigation. Garden plant is broad concept and there are no criteria for inclusion here. Reywas92Talk 15:02, 16 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Organisms-related deletion discussions. Reywas92Talk 15:02, 16 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 16:55, 16 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete Disagree with the deprod reason. There is no criteria for inclusion. What kind of plant is a "garden plant"? Better question, what kind of plant isn't? Ten Pound Hammer • (What did I screw up now?) 17:05, 16 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Keep. There are lots of sources available; I own three different print encyclopedias of garden plants and I'm not a gardener. By no means all plants are garden plants and actually it is a reasonably well-defined term. Having clicked on a selection, not all the entries are categorised as garden plants, and so it is not redundant to a category. Some of the comments on the talk page don't seem to have looked at the list, as the entries are genera, so the concern about including species/cultivars appears unfounded. For the record, I received a thanks notification for deprodding. Espresso Addict (talk) 17:24, 16 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Keep If its valid to list the entries as a category then its valid to put them on a list. Category:Garden plants It would be great if someone had a bot that would look at each article linked to and get additional information to put on a sortable column. This article was created in 2003, and has gotten 17,990 page views in the past 90 days alone.  Many find lists to be more useful than categories, you can scroll through all on one page, while the category for this is spread out over multiple pages.  So it is a valid navigational list.  You can also click on the reliable sources search at the top of this AFD and find ample results for "list of garden plants" and even more so if you just search for "garden plants".  Garden plant redirects to Ornamental plant, not sure which is used in textbooks and scientific publications or is the more commonly used term.  Anyway, if you need a definition for what a garden plant is, check there.   D r e a m Focus  17:56, 16 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Comment I would like some clarification over the definition of a "garden plant".
 * I assume it excludes house plants, glasshouse plants, etc., i.e. means plants grown outside in a garden.
 * I assume it mean a plant grown in gardens anywhere in the world. To give just one example, Hibiscus rosa-sinensis is in the category Category:Garden plants of Asia, which means garden plants originating in Asia. It's definitely a garden plant in tropical parts of the world, but not in temperate regions. There are many plants that could be in lists of garden plants for some countries but in lists of house, conservatory or glasshouse plants for others.
 * Referencing will be an issue; plants will need referencing individually, it seems to me. Is this feasible?
 * Are vegetables or fruit grown in gardens included? Does it actually mean "ornamental garden plants"?
 * Peter coxhead (talk) 19:43, 16 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Most of this can be sorted by editing, or possibly moving to a more appropriate title, without needing deletion. Given the length I'd be inclined to restrict it to plants predominantly grown for ornamental purposes. I don't think individual sources per entry are necessary; one could add a general list of default sources and only add specific entry sources where needed. The region issue could be solved by marking those genera where all the species are only cultivable as garden plants in, say, tropical regions. Many genera will have examples that can be grown under temperate conditions; Hibiscus also includes Hibiscus syriacus, for example. A list of individual species would be more of a problem, I agree, and would probably need splitting up. Espresso Addict (talk) 20:17, 16 May 2022 (UTC)
 * So is this a list of genera in which at least one species is grown in a garden as an ornamental plant somewhere in the world? My questions are not rhetorical; I really don't understand what is intended. Peter coxhead (talk) 21:11, 16 May 2022 (UTC)
 * The source is mentioned on the talk page (a references section was kind of a novelty in 2003, especially for lists), but the list content is based on just the one book, so while it's verifiable, there is no way for us to distinguish between genuine generality and authors' personal preferences. Intuitively, the list seems salvageable, but someone would need to figure out an objective criterion (sold in stores? successfully grown by non-professionals? mentioned in at least one gardening book's list? :-) ), that didn't also include every genus that master gardeners try out just to show off their mad skills.  I note that the modern standard for confirming a new species often entails growing some from seed, so the fact of *anybody* having grown a plant is not necessarily going to narrow things down much. Stan (talk) 02:45, 17 May 2022 (UTC)


 * Delete Point 1: this is based on a single source, the genus index of "The American Horticultural Society A-Z Encyclopedia of Garden Plants". That makes it basically a data dump of otherwise published tabular material, which we don't do. Point 2: the work in question has no pretensions to be global. As the foreword makes clear, it only covers plants that could be grown in North American gardens (go ahead and borrow it on the Internet Archive - I just returned the copy) - which is a rather debatable criterion for such a list. Point 3: even if this were turned into "Garden plants suitable for North American cultivation", there is no claim that the coverage in the source is comprehensive (they picked Interesting Stuff) nor could such a list ever be reasonably bounded. Much less so for a truly global list - practically everything may be grown in a garden somewhere. This list cannot be reasonably sourced or curated. -- Elmidae (talk · contribs) 09:08, 17 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Keep, while I agree with the concerns raised by the nominator, the topic passes WP:NLIST as garden plants have been extensively discussed as a group or set by independent reliable sources. There are many, many compendiums on garden plants. SailingInABathTub (talk) 15:07, 17 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete As per Elmidae. MrsSnoozyTurtle 22:37, 17 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete per my initial proposed deletion note (and I'd delete the category too). —Hyperik ⌜talk⌟ 22:47, 17 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Comment: I think policy and precedent are pretty strongly against this list, and Elmidae has a clear articulation of that argument, which I cannot really fault. I do not think the keep !votes make policy/precedent sense, especially the argument that garden plants are frequently discussed as a group or set. (Sure: and what plants are in that list? We can't answer that question, because what "garden plants" actually means depends on the context of the person using those words. It's not the "set" it appears to be.) That said, I do think Dream Focus's This article was created in 2003, and has gotten 17,990 page views in the past 90 days alone. is worth considering. It seems pretty clear that this is useful to many readers. Specifically, American readers, since as Elmidae observes, the source is "The American Horticultural Society A-Z Encyclopedia of Garden Plants". Is it so terrible to keep this list, renamed to something more appropriate, for the benefit of readers? I'd be interested to hear what the delete !voters might suggest for the name of such a list, even if they hate the idea, and what the keep !voters think of renaming the list to be specific to this source. I think the delete case is strong, and I'm not excited about a list of plant genuses with very little information provided alongside. But I wonder if there might be a reader-minded compromise here. -- asilvering (talk) 02:31, 19 May 2022 (UTC)
 * A lot of people do, apparently, navigate to this page, but does that really mean it's useful to them? Being sorted by Latin genus name, listing genuses rather than species (if relevant), only a fraction having a common name or type listed, simply being so massive with over 2,200 entries, and yet likely incomplete by whatever definition to be used makes this a daunting wall of text more than really useful. List of flowers redirects here, but this just doesn't have the context – or conciseness – to have a good use especially without better inclusion criteria. Reywas92Talk 03:01, 19 May 2022 (UTC)
 * I'm guessing people end up here because if you simply say "garden plant" to Google, the second of its suggestions for a longer search phrase is "list of garden plants", which if you click on it, gives this article as the second result (at least for me). So that's probably how this inadvertently ended up as one of Wikipedia's landing pages. However, it may be that the suggestion is prompted by the existence of this list, so if it goes away, so does the suggestion (I work at Google, but in the basement, don't know much about search result reporting). Stan (talk) 11:37, 19 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Yes, I think you're probably both right. I don't think we have any way to tell if readers immediately bounce off this page (as opposed to clicking through to some link they find helpful)? The more I look at this, the more I think it really isn't useful at all - I'm struggling to imagine a reader who knows enough Latin genus names to be able to operate the list, but who nonetheless needs to have the list as a reference or landing page. -- asilvering (talk) 20:29, 19 May 2022 (UTC)
 * There's data on how readers get to the page and where they go after reaching it here. 7% of outgoing page views were to Abelia (the first entry in the list). Of the 10 articles that get the most outgoing page views, 6 of them are in the first 10 entries in the list. This suggests that a substantial number of readers arriving at the article aren't really finding it useful to navigate to other articles, but are just clicking more or less at random on some of the first few entries. Plantdrew (talk) 17:42, 23 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Keep. There are lots of sources available.  WP:Not paper.  I agree with  User:Dream Focus and User:Asilvering. Let the readers get the benefit of this navigation page.  7&amp;6=thirteen (☎) 14:01, 19 May 2022 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.