The story of Persephone
Not just a Greek goddess, Persephone is a modern, powerful plant records system.
Persephone was developed by Plant Heritage as an easy to use system that keeps key data about the plants held in the National Plant Collections safe. Other systems were too complicated to use, too expensive or could not cope with the unusual plant varieties we keep safe in our conservation schemes. Today, Persephone is central to Plant Heritage's work and is also offered on subscription to record any plants in any garden anywhere.
The first version of Persephone was written by Toby Ross, then a postgraduate computer science student, on a shoestring budget. Persephone 2.0 was launched in March 2022 and built on nine years of technical and user experience. The system is being refined and upgraded all the time. As well as the National Collections, Persephone powers the Plant Guardian scheme, and holds more than one hundred thousand plant records for subscribers who have chosen it as their solution.
It is the perfect tool to record and organise the vast amount of information that can be associated with a plant collection of any size or shape - be that a National Plant Collection, a large botanical institution or a keen plantsperson's garden. Historical research, taxonomic revisions, breeding history, mapping and images can all be added easily, alongside plant lists and accession data. Further customisations are possible e.g. to feed website information.
Persephone is delivered as a partnership between Plant Heritage and a web and database design company, NXT Digital Solutions. This combines our expertise working with collections and plant data, with the latest in database design and functionality.
In 2023, were were proud to be awarded the UK IT Award Charity (Third Sector) Project of the Year prize by the British Computer Society. The judges commended Plant Heritage for demonstrating what can be achieved on a modest budget by a strong team of volunteers and staff working together for the common good.