Facebook is a great medium for on-the-fly chit-chat, but not so good for reference. Being a part of the Ontario Native Plant Gardening Group has been an enjoyable experience for me, and a welcome diversion from the usual Facebook fare (though it does get a bit testy itself at times). Every day I can count on a few or more posts to ground me in the real world, and it has been the source of valuable information and perspectives.

But the group has close to twenty thousand members now, and in that peculiar Facebook way, posts and shares soon get buried. A common refrain in this group is “Remember the link to this or that? I can’t find it back. Can someone please re-share it.” If you actually remembered the title, you could search for it — but who can do that after sixty.

So I set myself the goal of scrolling back through the Ontario Native Plant Gardening newsfeed and dragging each link into a group on my desktop. This is tedious job. You could do it all in one sitting, but eventually, with Facebook’s endless page bottom, your computer will protest that it’s run out of memory. Tell me about it! And if you do it in stages you have to start scrolling down from the beginning (or the end, actually) each time. I got 27 links before my memory gave out. I may have missed a few when my eyes were glazing over, but it’s a good start.

Now I’d like to share these links with my group buddies, but also with the unwashed masses who have yet to join this private group, and are still planting petunias and geraniums. I leave it to the group to remind me of links that I’ve missed. I will keep adding to the list as things pop up on the Facebook feed, as well as whatever missing, old links you share in the comments below. To keep it real, I’ll share here only things that have been shared with the group.

I’m tempted to comment on each link, but that’s too much work. If you take the titles and feed them into the group’s search box you should be able to find the original posts back, along with whatever comments were made. But I will organize these links roughly into a few categories. I hope that this becomes useful to group members and that it inspires non-group members to go native and join.

As everywhere in this website, I welcome your comments and suggestions on this and related pages.