Oregon State Landscape Plants Database Scraper

Scrape the Oregon State University landscape plants database (landscapeplants.oregonstate.edu) into clean, structured records — roughly 3,500 woody plants: trees, shrubs, vines, and groundcovers. Each plant becomes a row with scientific and common names, full taxonomy, foliage and flower detail, mature size, hardiness zones, soil and sun requirements, landscape uses, and image URLs. Built for landscape architects, nursery and horticulture teams, plant-ID and gardening apps, and anyone who needs the OSU woody plant reference as data instead of a website.

What it does

This actor crawls the OSU Landscape Plants species directory and extracts one structured record per plant. It walks the full species list and parses each plant's detail page into typed fields — no manual copy-paste from the OSU site, no PDF wrangling. Run it once for the whole ~3,500-plant catalog, or cap it with maxItems for a sample.

Each record includes:

• Taxonomy & names — scientific_name, common_names, family, genus, species, cultivar, and a stable slug
• Plant type & foliage — plant_type (tree, shrub, vine, groundcover…), foliage_type (deciduous/evergreen), foliage_color, fall_color, leaf_shape, leaf_arrangement, bark_description
• Flowers & fruit — flower_color, bloom_time, fruit_description
• Size & growth — height_range, width_range, growth_rate
• Site & culture — sun_exposure, soil_preference, drought_tolerance, hardiness_zones
• Ecology & use — native_to, propagation, pests, diseases, landscape_uses, identification_tips
• Media & source — image_urls (plant photos), osu_url (canonical OSU page)

Input

Field	Description
maxItems	Cap the number of plant records to scrape. Leave empty to crawl the full catalog (~3,500 plants).

The remaining inputs (sp_intended_usage, sp_improvement_suggestions, sp_contact) are optional — they let you tell us how you're using the data and request improvements; they don't affect the crawl.

Output

Results land in the dataset as one JSON object per plant, with all fields above. Export to JSON, CSV, or Excel from the Apify console or API.

Pricing

Pay-per-event (PPE) — you're billed per plant record returned, so a quick maxItems sample costs cents and the full catalog is predictable. No subscription, no per-run platform surprises.

Use cases

• Landscape & garden design — filter woody plants by hardiness zone, sun exposure, mature size, and drought tolerance to build planting palettes.
• Nursery & horticulture catalogs — seed a product database with consistent taxonomy, culture notes, and imagery.
• Plant-ID & gardening apps — back identification and care features with a clean reference of foliage, bark, flower, and fruit descriptions.
• Research & education — analyze the OSU woody-plant collection by family, native range, pest/disease susceptibility, or landscape use.

Notes

Data is sourced from Oregon State University's public Landscape Plants resource. Field availability varies by plant — not every record has every attribute populated on the source site.