Mary Bolack, who is very active on the HGA-Listserv, has assembled an extremely comprehensive database of horticultural documents. She has drawn from over 60 sources and has included over 14,000 pages of gardening information.

Most of the documents are actual Cooperative Extension Service bulletins that can be downloaded, illustrations and all, and resemble the same original documents you might request from the Service, only now they are as near as your computer keyboard. Other sources of documents include: private foundations, plant societies, and various other government and private entities.

The Ultimate Garden Tool uses the Windows compatible PageKeeper document management program from the Caere Corp., so the button bar and icons will be very familiar to users of their OCR programs.

Installing the CD was simple. Loading this vast database takes only a minute or so. The folders are arranged by source. You can look at all of the material available from a particular source, or you can search for specific subjects by feeding key words to the bloodhound. You can also do Boolean searches with up to three sets of "ands" or "ors" to narrow the search.

The result of any search brings up a prioritized list of documents on the subject, with the most important and complete documents listed first and highlighted. Clicking on this citation brings the actual document to the screen where it may be enlarged and read, downloaded to a printer, or FAXED.

I was not able to fool the Bloodhound in the PageKeeper program even once no matter what gardening-related key words I entered, nor did I come up with a blank on any Boolean subject search. All searches produced documents with the kind of good, practical of information you would expect from such well-known sources.

Entering the key words "greenhouses" and "hobby" brought up first a six-page document from the Extension Service at Oklahoma State, followed by 17 more priority articles, about 46 additional articles on related topics, and hundreds of documents on topics specific to growing plants in greenhouses.

If there is another easily searchable horticultural databases that contains this much high quality information on a CD-ROM, I have not heard of it. Everything you want to know about gardening seems to be right here.

[Min. requirements: 80386 processor or higher, Windows 3.1 or higher, Windows-compatible mouse, 4MB of RAM (8 recommended) 15MB free hard drive space, swap file of at least 10MB.]

[Available at discount through the HGA Bookshop]