As per topic heading.
If the plant was intentionally planted, then yes. But if it wasn’t, then it’s wild, despite its location.
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Not always - sometimes there will be self-sown weeds or volunteer plants. If the observer specifies that they think it’s not planted, I’ll go with their opinion unless it’s obviously incorrect.
But for established specimens, generally yes.
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Well there are weeds of course. And you might need to form your own opinion on whether self-sown seedlings of planted plants are wild.
Otherwise, it varies by garden. Some gardens are 100% constructed while others might include some natural vegetation.
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this is a really important point in particular. Many Australian botanic gardens, especially those outside the core of capital cities, have sections of original/natural vegetation
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I agree, but if you are uncertain, please ask the observer for more information or why they think it was wild before voting „captive“.
I keep having to go through observations of mine I made even just near the botanical garden and vote „wild“ on them because someone marks them „not wild“…
@roz_rogers iNat has a few examples here on what is captive and what isn’t: https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000169932-what-does-captive-cultivated-mean-
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I’d also say some are “escaped”, if that’s the right term. Meaning its ancestors may have been intentionally planted, but this is progeny that has self-sown from those ancestral specimens. The fact it’s naturalizing would make it an edge case IMO.
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I wouldn’t consider self-seeding alone to be a criterion for wildness – it is whether the plant is self-seeding where it was not intended/wanted (in iNat’s definition: “spreading outside the intended gardening area”).
In a botanical garden, there may be plants that are intended to re-seed themselves (e.g., many gardens have park-like areas representing different ecosystems); if it is part of the intended flora of a particular area of the garden, I would treat it as captive/cultivated. If it has spread into some other area where it clearly is not intended to be, I think it is reasonable to treat it as wild (e.g., I have an observation of a non-established Campanula species growing on the outside wall of the local botanical garden).
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Make a copypasta to use as a note - this is in the botanical garden, but this plant is Wild because …
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/183841424
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/149895908
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Thank you. It was clearly intentionally planted.
I’ve also encountered this with folks who are growing native plants in their yards. If they planted the seeds they bought several years ago, and if the plants have been growing every year in roughly the same place ever since, it seems to me that those are cultivated plants.
At the same time, restored grasslands often have plants intentionally seeded. At what point do those plants become “wild”? There are almost certainly many wildflowers growing in parks and nature preserves in my area that are the descendants of something planted on purpose, but it goes back so many years I don’t know how you would even know unless you happened to be there at the time!
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For me, it would be better not to consider really wild specimens the offspring germinated in the botanical garden where the mother plant is cultivated. These places are often not equal to a really natural environment and there are no evidences they could germinate and survive elsewhere.
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Hate to break it to you but most environments aren’t “natural” anymore. To deny the amount that humans have changed the landscapes (and how easy/difficult it is for various organisms to survive and reproduce in them) doesn’t make any sense.
I have not described such environments as too man-affected in comparison with others that would be totally virgin. As a botanist, I am very interested in deeply anthropized habitats.
I think we should set a border between what can be considered really wild and what is just a semblance of wildness just for a practical reason.
A closed property, which can be something similar to a botanical garden, can have places where wild species coming from outside can germinate and sometimes also thrive. At the same time, there can be cultivated species that can produce an offspring due to a massive production of propagules or by vegetative growth. Think, for example, about the mothers of millions that can spread tens of plantlets very close to where they are cultivated. If this happens inside a private property should they be considered wild? I hope it shouldn’t.
Why should the ownership of a property affect the wild status of the organisms that live on it? That doesn’t make any sense.
It makes sense to me. For example, if I find Microsorum punctatum in a rainforest gully within its known range - it’s wild. If it’s been bought from a nursery and deliberately planted around my friend’s urban garden, whether within or outside its range - it’s definitely not wild in my mind.
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Well yeah, in that situation it is not wild, because it was intentionally planted in your friend’s urban garden. But if the seed came up on its own, it’s wild regardless of location.
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It is not a matter of ownership. The fact is that, if we adopt a biological approach, there is no or just little sense in considering really wild a plant that has grown beside its parent(s) in a private garden. The same if it happens in a botanical garden.
I think that somehow similar considerations have been made regarding those cases of water turtles or goldfishes found in fountains or artificial pools. It is not known who put them there but it can be questioned if they could have survived in really wild conditions.
Surviving in “wild conditions” is not a requirement to be wild on iNaturalist. And in fact, the very fact that indoor populations count as wild contradicts this idea. The turtles and fish are captive because they are where humans intended them to be.
Which is exactly the same if the offspring is born at the foot of the parent plant in a garden/botanical garden. If this happen in a public green space it is a similar case but we could consider it as an example of escaping from cultivation.
Reconnecting to my first post, it is just a proposal to circumscribe what can be considered “wild” from what is very far from being really wild.
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