Have you seen the Identification Etiquette topic on this forum? It just occurred to me that these particular questions might fit there. https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/identification-etiquette-on-inaturalist-wiki/1503
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I would not have anticipated the route this conversation has taken and the richness of the discussion for a recent arrival to iNat like myself. You can learn a lot just hanging around listening to people. I really need to dedicate some time to rummaging around in the archives reading randomly.
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In the end I let the observation I referred to above stand and it produced an interesting and ultimately informative series of IDs and an RG rating.
Now I have just received an ID that is more or less the flip side of this topic. I posted some photos that I had taken long before joining iNat. I just got an ID on one that seemed odd, opened the observation and discovered that the photographs I posted were not related to the plant I thought I was reporting and are in fact a photograph from a garden up the street from my house (lesson associated with this: don’t post without opening the thumbnails and looking at what you’re posting).
This one I’m thinking I will delete. I don’t really want photographs of domestic cultivars (which I’m pretty sure this is) in my iNat account but having posted the thing I’ve induced somebody to correct my original observation and figure I at least need to give them a heads up.
So are there any thoughts on why I should leave this one alone? If not, it’s going away.
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I’m a gardener so I have a different viewpoint about the worth of including domesticated cultivars on iNat than some others here might. Perhaps someone starts with identifying pansies and then ends up with an interest in wild violets growing on a geothermal plain in Iceland. Familiar cultivated plants can be a bridge to the rare and even the endangered. If you’ve identified any plant, leave it as a signpost to someone else.
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Fair enough. The person who made the ID also argued for keeping it.
I garden, although the tomatoes and raspberries are my preferred domestic plants. At our previous house I had a beautiful set of native plant gardens - woodland under the cherry tree, prairie behind the garage, a wet butterfly garden in the front. My wife gardens for colour, texture and form. I’m more about the pollen. Native plant gardening is a smaller thing in the place where we live now, but we have had moose on the street, bears forage on berries where we walk in the evenings and pileated woodpeckers come to my birdfeeders, so there are lots of native plants (and other things) without me growing them and it’s all good.
All of which is off topic. My thoughts about deleting it were about my reasons for being on iNat, not what I think about iNat’s reasons for being here. I get why some people would want to keep records of cultivars. I’m trying to learn about bumble bees on the one hand and to convince the mayor that the park that is currently being chewed to snot by ATVs is an oasis of biodiversity in our little town and deserving of more respect than it gets on the other. More generally, I like being around wild things.
Anyway, the cultivar will stay and as a general principle I will conserve the rest of my booboos as I go. It’s all data, I guess.
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I mostly photo just wild plants, but sometimes I’ve posted a garden one I found interesting. I also photo’d several garden plants to include in my “dissected flowers” project for classes. I’d recommend photoing mostly wild plants and marking the cultivated ones as cultivated. You have wide latitude to post what you want here, and as noted above sometimes cultivated plants are useful.
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If I were being completely honest here I’d acknowledge that my motivation for getting rid of the observation was mostly about having posted those images in error because I didn’t bother to open the thumbnails and look at them properly. Nobody really wants the world to see their bouts of laziness laid bare.
Alas, that nag has already fled the stable. The cultivar is now part of the permanent record.
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That’s great to have such variety. Can’t say I’ve seen any moose recently, but I’m relieved that the wildest of wild animals in my state,the American Alligator, doesn’t come as far north as the Piedmont region.
When it comes to encouraging wildlife in my yard my philosophy is if I plant it they will come. I never know what critter will take shelter, eat, or pollinate my flowers native or ornamental. I plant whatever can be at home and survive in the less than optimal spots. I’ve found some ornamentals handle heat islands by pavements better. Happy gardening & exploring!
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