CAL FLORA

This might be a little to technical for some but a great place for landscape designers and plant enthusiasts. It is a website called CalFlora. A giant wild California plant search database. You can use this site to search for a gazillion plants based on what you are looking for and where you live. For example I live in Orange County, CA and I can search for wild plants that are native to Orange County. How cool is that.

Cal flora is a non profit and was created as a collaborative research project to collect and re-distribute information about California's wild plants, including habitat descriptions, photographs, observations, nomenclature, and distribution maps.

The database provides:

• comprehensive habitat and distribution information for wild plants
  
• 800,000 plant location observations
• information on over 30,000 relationships between old and new plant names
• access to hundreds of thousands of photographs of California plants
  
• online tools that help users find, display, and download the information they need

You don't have to sign up for an account if you don't want to. Just you the tools as a guest to try it out. Have fun!