In the early 1990s, when the Internet and e-mail were becoming generally available, I found that there was already a wealth of gardening information among some of the first data available. I began conversing with various people around the world on this and other topics. What an exciting time - meeting people in a variety of places I had only heard about (or not at all!), and sharing our personal experiences freely, across all borders when language was not a barrier.

But soon some of our conversation started to seem a bit strange. Here were people talking about the same plants I was growing in my own garden in California, but their experience with them seemed so different than my own. These same plants grew better or worse, were dormant at different times, and flowered more profusely or less than my own. When we bothered to actually investigate where each of us was located, and what our respective climates were like, suddenly it all started to make sense.

Our regional climates were vastly different from each other - something e-mail masked in our conversations - with obvious impact upon the plant we each grew. I started to consider my own climate in more detail, if only to relay it to these people with whom I was e-mailing. I realized that my San Francisco Bay Area climate was classified as 'mediterranean' and I began an exploration of what were it's unique charateristics.

This ultimately led me to create the Medit-Plants e-mail forum, a discussion focused upon plants and gardening in mediterranean climates worldwide. Around the same time (1994), The Mediterranean Garden Society (MGS) was getting it's start.

Eventually, working with author and MGS member Hugo Latymer, at that time a avid Medit-Plants participant, the mediterranean climate gardening throughout the world web site (the forerunner of this site) was created as a way of preserving information flowing out of the Medit-Plants e-mail forum. It only made sense for the MGS to be a corner stone of this new web site, so each web page came to contain a link to MGS pages included on the site.

This presense on the Internet soon had a major impact on the Society's growth, at times half their new membership coming from people browsing or 'surfing the net' and stumbling upon the MGS pages.