Although there is good reason to be circumspect in using Google Images, I think some of you are being too hard on Google. This is still a very new medium, and it obviously needs work. A simple user feedback program might be one sensible way to go with this. I have to chuckle when I read about the supposed superiority of the print media. Would that it were so. Certain taxa dear to the hearts of many members of this group - the Amaryllidaceae comes to mind immediately - have suffered grievously in the print media, in particular in the vanity press diverticulum of the print media. Nor is this a new problem. Two of the works most revered in the English speaking world, Gerard's Herball and Parkinson's Paradisus, might have raised some of the same concerns from late sixteenth and early seventeenth century cognoscenti: These iconic works contain numerous erroneous images. And how do we know that they are erroneous? Because the publisher of the Herball and the publisher of the Paradisus used crude (and presumably plagiarized - although that concept was evidently not well developed at the time) copies (often mirror image copies) of the prints used in the major contemporaneous continental botanical works. Back in those days only the very few would have access to libraries with the best contemporary works for comparison, and fewer still would have had the language skills needed to use them. Someone suggested that the images should be vetted. In a world where professional taxonomists don't agree among themselves, who will do the vetting? Give Google a break! If you get thirty results, and of those thirty, twenty-five are similar, doesn't that tell you something? What difference does it make if of the remainder one is someone's dog, another is a work of art of no immediately perceptible relevance and so on. I have a fairly extensive personal horticultural/botanical library. The books are falling off the shelves. But it represents only a drop in the bucket of potential knowledge. Ron Ratko's seed list arrived the other day (the email version). Just guessing, but my personal library might have told me what five percent of his offerings are. I spent several happy hours Google-ing the names on that list. There are images out there for just about everything I checked. And it's all "shelved" in the two square feet of table space where I place my computer and monitor. I think that's amazing. I don't' think a day goes by that I don't use Google Images for something: I don't want to contemplate life without it. This is the future: don't try to strangle it in the crib. Jim McKenney jimmckenney@jimmckenney.com Montgomery County, Maryland, USA, USDA zone 7 My Virtual Maryland Garden http://www.jimmckenney.com/ Webmaster Potomac Valley Chapter, NARGS Editor PVC Bulletin http://www.pvcnargs.org/ Webmaster Potomac Lily Society http://www.potomaclilysociety.org/