Gesneriad Reference Web | Documenting the Gesneriaceae (original) (raw)

. . . to the wonderful world of gesneriads!

Gesneriads are many things — very beautiful, profoundly interesting and widely distributed. Best of all, many of them are happy to be beautiful and interesting in your home, where they can not only live, but thrive.

The Gesneriad Reference Web has a simple but powerful mission. We are resolved to:

Provide comprehensive, up-to-date and accessible information on the entire Gesneriad family, documenting its beauty, botany and complexity for a broad audience

The GRW has four main components, all accessible from the menu above:

• The Genera pages include brief descriptions of each of the more than 100 Gesneriaceae genera featured on the site (with more being added all the time). From each genus page you can navigate to the thousands of pages for species and hybrids, which usually feature high quality “zoomable” images of plants along with notes on most of them and links to more photos.
• The Articles include comprehensive pieces on specific subjects written by experts for the GRW, and we anticipate that many more will be posted in due course.
• The Antique Prints pages include hundreds of high-resolution scans of botanical prints from the 19th Century or earlier, most more than 150 years old. Many are individually hand colored and most are exceptionally beautiful. Large images can be downloaded for printing on paper or fabric.
• The Library is a compendium of almost 1000 professional botanical articles, most from 1995 to the present with some older (important) articles also included. Most of these have both an abstract (the summary published with the article) and a PDF of the full article.

We provide more detailed descriptive information about the Gesneriaceae and the GRW on pages linked to the images cycling above, including:

• A Gesneriad family overview
• Navigating the GRW
• The Gesneriad Society
• Who we are

Among the most useful features of the GRW are the powerful search tools, outlined in detail on the page “Navigating the GRW” above. Using Advanced Search you can find almost anything really quickly. For instance, we have posted images of outstandingly beautiful prize-winning plants from Gesneriad Society flower shows, and have added searchable tags to each image – for example, use advanced search to find images from the 2020 virtual show by searching tags for GS2020 – or any other year going back a long time! We’ve placed a shortcut to that search at the top right of this page, but you can initiate searches for other years, or for anything at all, yourself.

So, come on in! Enjoy yourself! And remember to send us feedback.

The GRW Team