Seeds of survival — and labels you can design yourself

@media only screen and (max-width: 600px) { .mob-pad { padding-left: 20px !important; padding-right: 20px !important; } .mob-img { width: 100% !important; max-width: 100% !important; } h1 { font-size: 22px !important; } h2 { font-size: 17px !important; } } Seeds of survival — and labels you can design yourself In July, a padded envelope from Hiroshima arrived at an arboretum in Virginia — a handful of ginkgo seeds destined to become a living monument to peace, planted for people not yet born when it goes into the ground. On the practical side, we have plenty to share too from Plantsoon: label management just had a serious upgrade, and we're introducing you today to “Plantsoon Shop”, where you can design and order your labels yourself — directly in our platform. To round things off, we provide a short read from our Insights series. Here's what's been growing at Plantsoon. Success story Living collections Seeds of survival — a Hiroshima ginkgo for Chesterfield County Arboretum On July 16, a padded envelope arrived at the Chesterfield County Arboretum in Virginia. Inside was a foil packet: Green Legacy Hiroshima, Ginkgo biloba seeds. These seeds come from hibakujumoku: trees that survived the atomic bombing of 1945. They grew back at a time when people feared nothing would grow there for decades. It started with a webinar. Lisa Ferrel was watching: an ISA Certified Arborist who has worked for Chesterfield County for 19 years. She learned that the San Diego Botanic Garden distributes the seeds for Green Legacy Hiroshima in the region, so she wrote and asked. The seeds are in cold stratification now. Once they germinate, the seedlings will be raised under cover, and then planted on the 1917 Historic Courthouse Green. Green Legacy Hiroshima asks its partners to plant a tree and to share its story. A ginkgo on a courthouse lawn cannot do that on its own. Without its story, it is simply a beautiful tree. The Arboretum, ArbNet accredited since 2019, uses Plantsoon to give the ginkgo a public Flora page: its origin, its purpose and its first photographs. Anyone can read it: a visitor, a teacher, or a passer-by who wonders about the tree. A memorial plaque is read once. A tree is visited, season after season. Read the full story How a peace tree found its way from Hiroshima to a Virginia courthouse green.  Read the story → New feature Labels Labels: their own admin area, smarter filters and full control over your QR codes Managing the labels in your garden just got a lot easier. Every label now has its own admin area, so everything about a single label sits in one place instead of being spread across screens. Think of the QR code on a Plantsoon label like a picture frame on the wall: the frame stays in place, but you can swap the photo inside at any time. In Plantsoon, you decide what each QR code points to — a Flora, Garden Feature, Zone or Collection — and you can change that whenever you need to. Unlink it, relink it to something else, done. This is especially handy with our S, M or SQ tags, since they have no custom engraving, so you can reassign them freely. And if you would rather send visitors to your own website, a QR code can point to your own URL instead. Working with your labels got easier too. The labels overview now has filters to find what you're looking for fast. You can link or unlink several labels at once — with a heads-up first if any of them were custom engraved. And in the Flora overview, you can see at a glance which plants still need a label. Now live Everything that changed, in detail.  Read the full release notes → Sneak peek Shop Introducing the Plantsoon Shop: design and order your labels yourself We're dotting the i's and crossing the t's for the Plantsoon Shop release, where you will be able to design, configure and order your Plantsoon labels straight from the portal, in an intuitive way. You'll be able to browse labels and mounting accessories with clear pricing, then configure your sign — design, variant, mounting holes, lines of text, fonts, your own logo — and watch a live label preview update as you go. When you assign the labels to your records, Plantsoon pulls the information straight from within your Flora, Zones, Collections and Garden Features. Plantsoon italicizes botanical names automatically, according to convention, and flags text that won't fit before anything is engraved. Behind the scenes This one was a challenge, because there was no blueprint to follow. Collection management software usually stops at a CSV export, and label makers start from a spreadsheet you send them. The last step, where your records become a physical object, has always been manual work. Closing that gap meant teaching a database how engraving works: label dimensions, character widths per font, where a name breaks across lines, which words italicize. An engraved label is a long-term investment in your garden and in your visitor experience, while Plantsoon lets you keep updating your records in real time. With Plantsoon Shop, we try to make the label ordering process as intuitive and easy as possible. We're opening the Shop to customers gradually, so we can respond to your feedback along the way. Email us at hello@plantsoon.com if you'd like early access. Insights Visitor experience The economics of repeat visits — what one returning visitor is really worth An admission ledger for the day records every visitor as the same single line — one ticket, one entry, one afternoon spent — which quietly treats a first-time stranger and a devoted annual returner as if they are worth the same. They are not. Our newest Insights article looks at what the research on retention and loyalty says about that gap. Businesses learned long ago that value builds up over a relationship, not in a single transaction. Research on gardens adds something worth noting: it is the quality of the experience, not the amount of information, that turns a first-time visitor into a returning one. Satisfaction and loyalty come from emotion and the senses, more than from the facts a garden hands out. There is a second payoff. Visitors who feel connected recommend you to others, and a recommendation is marketing you never pay for, from someone the listener already trusts. So a returning visitor is not one ticket. They are a stream of future visits, by themselves and by others. That is worth keeping in mind when you plan a budget: part of what you spend on attracting new visitors may work harder if you spend it on bringing back the ones you already have. From Plantsoon Insights The full article, with the research behind it and what it means for your green space.  Read the article → Also worth reading: From sign to experience — how interactive plant labels turn visitors into returning guests. Accreditation Give your tree collection the recognition it deserves ArbNet is the only global accreditation program for arboreta, and getting accredited is more achievable than you might think. From schools to parks to county government complexes, Plantsoon helps you document your trees, meet the standards, and earn official recognition. Our ArbNet Starter Package lets you become a Level I Accredited Arboretum using digital labels, which costs you… nothing at all. Ready to get accredited? Start your ArbNet accreditation journey — for free Our ArbNet Accreditation Starter Package is completely free and gives you everything you need to document your tree collection, meet ArbNet standards and achieve recognition, without the complexity. FREE Get the Starter Package → Your ideas matter — share them with us We're always looking to improve Plantsoon, both the platform and our physical plant labels. If you have suggestions, ideas, or feedback on anything we could do better, we'd love to hear from you. Write to us at hello@plantsoon.com. Your input directly shapes what we build next.