Medit-Plants e-mail forum

Around this time (summer 1995), I found a host institution for a ‘listserv’ e-mail forum idea I had a year or so before.  A professor at UC Davis decided that an e-mail discussion group focused on the mediterranean climates of the world was a good augment to their Ornamental Horticulture curriculum.  Thus began the Medit-Plants listserv.

The initial e-mail thread has apparently been lost (if anyone find messages before the start of 1997, please contact me!), but most of the messages have been archived on the Hort.net site, where they can be browsed or searched.  It is still a wealth of information.

For those unfamiliar with e-mail listservs – basically you send an e-mail to an address with specific commands to ‘subscribe’ you to the list; then whenever someone sends a message to the group address, all subscribers receive a copy.  In current technology, you might think of it as an expanded form of Twitter, where you could ‘follow’ something but what you received was not limited to 140 characters!  It was a true discussion and many people, at various levels of expertise, asked each other questions, talked about their experiences, etc.

It was here that I met so many interesting people – Olivier Filippi, Gary Matson, Hugo Latymer, and many others.  They each had their own projects and interests that dovetailed into mine, and we discussed many interesting ideas and approaches to furthering all of our efforts.

As moderator, I would occasionally need to intervene and lay out rules of etiquette, etc.  I would even sometimes need to remove someone from the list of subscribers.  But by and large, it was a peaceful group or 300-400 people at any given moment.  As of 2016, this e-mail forum is still in existence, but it has become dormant.  This type of discussion now takes place in the mediterranean climate gardening Facebook group, which I started in 2013.