GARDENING : Sunset’s CD-ROM: No Bugs, Plenty of Bytes

Does every bush you plant in that shady spot next to the house eventually wither away? Are you looking for a lawn that will flourish in both your sunny front yard and your shady back yard? Are you stumped about what to plant around that 50-foot tree in your back garden?

With the aid of the new Sunset “Western Garden” CD-ROM, you can solve many of your garden problems with the click of a mouse.

Sunset’s perennially best-selling “Western Garden Book” is now available on CD-ROM for Macintosh or MPC/Windows.

“We spent about a year and close to one-half million dollars to develop this,” said Ken Winchester, editorial director of Sunset Books in Menlo Park.

He demonstrated a prototype of the CD-ROM at the sixth annual Garden Show held April 8 and 9 at South Coast Plaza Crystal Court in Costa Mesa. The final version will be in garden centers and bookstores the first week of May and will list at $49.99.

“We saw this as an opportunity to bring the Sunset ‘Western Garden Book’ into the 21st Century,” Winchester added. “We’ve received numerous requests from our readers via letters and the Internet to develop a computerized version.”

The CD-ROM isn’t intended to replace the written compendium, which was updated and revised this year.

“People take the book into their gardens and to the nurseries,” Winchester said. “The CD-ROM is designed to complement it.”

Four Sunset staff members and about a dozen consultants and photographers worked on developing an infomation format that would simplify garden planning, design and maintenance for garden enthusiasts, whether novice or expert.

The heart of the CD-ROM is the Encyclopedia and Plant Selector, which gives a detailed explanation of 6,000 plants, each with high-quality photographs, information about requirements and tips for use in a landscape.

If the user’s computer is equipped for sound, a voice pronounces the plant’s botanical name.

Plants can be found using either their botanical or common names. The photograph can be enlarged to fill the entire computer screen or left as part of the overall information display, which includes sun or shade requirements, water needs and optimum growing zones.

Because most people are concerned mainly with what grows in their own garden, the Plant Encyclopedia goes into further detail. Users can type in their ZIP codes, and the CD-ROM lists the plants that grow best in that climate zone. The list can be further refined by specifying plant types, color, height or sun and water requirements.

And the information can be printed out and taken along on the trip to a nursery or garden center.

“This is a data base search tool that also enables each gardener to create his or her own personal data base,” Winchester added. The Garden Notebook can be used to save a list of favorite plants and any notes.

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The U.S. Department of Agriculture has defined 10 climate zones in the United States based on highest and lowest average temperatures. Sunset has simplified gardening in the West by defining 24 zones that take into account additional factors such as ocean currents, desert winds and topography, and the CD-ROM contains a section explaining these zones.

The result is a more accurate explanation of the West’s unique growing conditions and is, therefore, more useful in plant selection. The CD-ROM contains more than 2,000 color photographs and illustrations. About 45 minutes of video clips show Sunset’s master gardeners demonstrating techniques in Sunset test gardens. It also contains 15 reprints from Sunset magazines.

The CD-ROM has been designed to accommodate the novice computer user.

“It’s a very fast program and very simple to operate,” Winchester said.