Recordkeeping for Seasonal Displays | May Coffee Chat 2025

Our second May IrisBG Coffee Chat, features John Chau, Plant Curator at Filoli. John has his PhD in Plant Systematics and has transitioned to collections work at public gardens when he started at Filoli in 2020. He is responsible for maintaining plant records, including for an extensive seasonal display program in the formal garden, cut flower garden, and vegetable garden. 

In this session, John shares his smart, organized approach to managing seasonal display records across Filoli’s formal gardens, cut flower garden, and vegetable garden. 

🌟 Plus: We introduce new functionality in IrisBG that brings greater flexibility for capturing detailed seasonal display data—making it easier than ever to record, access, and analyze your display collections.

Thanks to all of you who joined us! The Coffee Chat attendees were more experienced users with 46% intermediate users, 34% advanced users, 20% novice.
	The majority of attendees do have seasonal displays but are split on whether or how they keep the records of the seasonal display items.

The map below shows the gardens and arboreta represented by those who registered for the Coffee Chat - home offices not taken into consideration.   

During his presentation John shows how he uses IrisBG to plan propagations requests, track plant spacing, and record details about his seeds and plant materials. His work can now be enhanced in the latest IrisBG version, that includes the feature to create Custom Item Attributes. 

John graciously provided copies of his excel spreadsheets with the formulas included and formatted as import templates for IrisBG and contain formulas with helpful calculations from his display planning. 

🌱Please note that you will need to add your own Custom Item Attributes in order to be able to import this level of detail.  Any of the fields in John's Spreadsheets that begin with "AtrI_" will need to be added to your database. 

Learn more about Custom Item Attributes in the article about IrisBG software version: 4.6.1.25052