You might consider using Dojo's Page Filter. You can assign each plant a specific attribute (such as outdoor or indoor) or you can assign multiple attributes to each plant (outdoor, shade, etc...)

By clicking a menu option based on your custom attributes your pages are automatically shuffled to display the appropriate page list.

take a look at this page:http://www.rynomediaonline.com
we created a portfolio and then assigned each item in the portfolio an attribute (web, print, brand). now, when you click on an option (web for instance) you see only the items in our portfolio that are web related.

Thank you. I do need to be able to sort the plants into several categories so will look at this, and possibly resources explaining how to build the filters myself, on my return from holiday in just over a week.
Cheers

That Dojo Page Filter looks really cool -- I didn't realize it had all those effects (he really should make a better description page for it!)

If you'd rather go the do-it-yourself route (without cool animated effects), the way these things are done in C5 is generally this:

1) Each plant has a page. In essence, each page in a C5 site is a database record (just happens to be accessible via a URL and have a bunch of content in it)

2) To do a "query" or "view" or "list" or "index" (or whatever you want to call it) of plants, you use the "Page List" block. The page list block shows titles and descriptions of all pages matching certain criteria. You may also find this free addon helpful:
http://www.concrete5.org/marketplace/addons/page-list-teasers/...
...as it lets the page list block show actual content from the page in the excerpt instead of just the "description" field.

One limitation of this is that the Page List block only allows filtering based on 2 criteria: page type and page location (in the sitemap). So if the plants are only in one category each then this works fine -- structure the sitemap so each plant page is under a top-level "category" page. But if a plant could be in more than one category then this becomes trickier because the Page List block doesn't let you filter on custom attributes. To do this, you'd need to use something like the Dojo Page Filter mentioned above, *or* construct your own block or page list query using the "page_list" object in code. If you want to go that route, there's a bunch of resources in the forums for making it work (search for "page list object" I think).

Hope that helps.

-Jordan

Thank you for that. Yeah, I will need each plant to come under more than one criteria so will look into it a little further and check out those resources you mentioned. Might as well start sooner rather than later (kinda miss my dmwvr and access though - least I knew what I was doing then :-(
Cheers