Gabe Verduzco, social media plant detective
Many modern gardeners are harvesting their heirloom beans and tomatoes with their smartphones by their sides, posting photos of amysterious weed to Reddit’s What Is This Plant? feed or asking for fertilizer advice on Twitter’s #gar denchat. One of the people most likely to respond to both gardeners’ and nature enthusiasts’ tweets is a young, techsavvy Bay Area horticulturist named Gabe Verduzco, whose handle is @gabev23.
Verduzco, an assistant horticulturalist at Filoli’s estate gardens in Woodside, is an iPhone sleuth, seeking out photos and questions via his Twitter app, searching keyword hashtags like #flowers and #gardening. When Verduzco finds a tweeted photo asking for identification, he goes on a mission to find the answer, trying to respond to every single tweet he receives.
“There’s a lot of detective work involved in being a horticulturalist,” Verduzco said. “There is such a vast amount of trees and plants that very few people can know every single plant and tree. It bugs me if I can’t figure things out, and I’ll call someone I know or look online until I find it.”
Part of a young digital-native generation who are never far from their iPhones, Verduzco has a large social media presence, tweeting and Instagramming dozens of times aweek.
An avid gardener who prizes his ‘Cherokee’ purple tomatoes, Verduzco made his first foray into combining social media and the naturalworld in 2007,
with a gardening page on Facebook.
“I gotmy buddy into vegetable gardening, andwe started a little Facebook called Garden Bros” (www.face book.com/gardenbros, now more active on Instagram @gardenbros), Verduzco said. He hopes to start awebsite consolidating his social media presence and giving more gardening and plant identification information.
In 2009, Verduzco started the Twitter page, and in 2011, he created an Instagram profile specializing in photos of his favorite plants.
“It doesn’t surprise me how (gardening) has carried over to social media,” Verduzco said. “I add Twitter followers on Instagram and it creates a whole social media friendship. What I really like about doing it is just helping a person, but also it helps me learn more about plants. It’s fun and I get to utilize media.”
Over the three years that Verduzco has been tweeting, he has made a few unusual identifications, including one of the Acalypha hispida, also known as the chenille plant.
“It’s a really interesting, beautiful plant,” Verduzco said. “The flower is this nice red flower, but it’s fuzzy and long, strange and cool.”