Botanical Gardens Editing and Proofreading Services

A botanical garden is a scientific collection that the public walks through, and the label is where those two purposes meet. A plant record holds accession data, provenance, taxonomy and conservation status; a visitor standing in front of the plant wants to know what it is, why it is interesting and whether they could grow one. Labels written from the record satisfy the curator and communicate nothing; labels written for the visitor lose the information that makes the collection a collection.

We edit what botanical gardens, arboreta and public horticultural collections produce — plant labels and their information hierarchy, interpretation panels and trail material, collection and conservation programme descriptions, seasonal highlights and what's-in-flower information, garden guides and self-guided trail text, visitor orientation and map copy, education and schools programme material, volunteer guide training and script material, plant records and accession documentation, seed bank and conservation collection documentation, membership and supporter communications, event and course descriptions, and grant applications and conservation reporting. Our editors work on the label as the collection's most-read publication.

The plant label is the shortest and most-read text a garden produces, and its design is a hierarchy problem. A label carrying the botanical name, the family, the accession number, the wild provenance, the conservation status and the common name gives all of it equal weight, and a visitor reads none of it. We work on these so the reading order matches how a visitor actually approaches — what it is called in ordinary words first, then the botanical name, then the one fact that makes this plant worth stopping for; so the interesting fact is specific to this specimen or species rather than generic, since "native to South America" is not a reason to look at anything; so the scientific apparatus is present but subordinate, because the accession data matters and does not need to be the first thing; and so a small number of plants carry a longer label rather than every plant carrying a medium one, because a garden where everything is interpreted equally is a garden where nothing is read. Gardens that grade their labelling this way find visitors reading more, not less.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including collection records and material before publication. We are editors rather than botanists or horticulturists, and we offer no view on taxonomy, nomenclature, conservation status or any scientific matter. What we can do is make labels and interpretation readable while keeping the record intact.