For 35 years, JLBG has used white plastic garden tags to label all 27,000+ taxa of plants in the gardens at JLBG. Although, those tags have been functional, they are far too easy to become hidden and then crushed underfoot. Several years ago, we switched to adhesive computer generated tags which were attached to the plastic tags. Although we were promised that these would last 3-5 years, those years turned out to be months, significantly ramping up our labor costs to keep the labels readable. Fortunately, that’s all changing with our recent purchase of our first laser engraver, which will take over the tag making duties.

We’ve actually had the laser for eight months, but it’s taken us that long to get in installed, wired, vented, and speaking coherently with our plant inventory database. After quite a bit of trial and error, we officially started printing garden labels this week.

We’re not sure how many tags we’ll get printed and stuck by fall open house, but we hope you enjoy the new tags, which should be much easier to read and to locate in the garden.