Question about building a drupal site

Yes, I would say Drupal is well suited to your kind of site, although the learning curve can sometimes be difficult for people. Depending on your knowledge and skills, though, most people who turn to Drupal are happy with their choice.

As for developing the site in a subdirectory, yes, this is easily done, and moving from a subdirectory to the main domain is a smooth transition (usually) and sometimes requires no work except maybe checking on settings.php, as long as you don't hardcode things to point to the subdirectory.

Take a look at the showcase forum to see some sites built on Drupal.

I think Drupal would be perfect for you. And I did my first Drupal site exactly the way you want to.

Another alternative for you is to build your Drupal site on your PC and upload it when you're ready.

Nancy W.
now running 5 sites on Drupal so far
Drupal Cookbook (for New Drupallers)
Adding Hidden Site Design Notes

As others stated your site is a perfect Drupal candidate.

Think of being able to do this, you click a link called Create Content.

You select the type called Plant (something you'd create yourself), now you'll have some options(default).

Title: [White Pine]
Body: [description of plant]

If you Create that you'd have a new page at yoursite.com/node/1 that would display White Pine and the Description in whatever theme you had active.

But, here's where Drupal shines you can add all kinds of things like new ways of categorizing/tagging your plants, its all up to you. You could have it so it works like this:

Plant Name: [White Pine]
Plant Type: [tree, shrub]
Plant Category: [evergreen]
Plant Image: [link to img]
Description: [description]

So you make a new Plant, fill in that info, then using Drupal and a few user contributed modules like Views you can list all the Plants that are tree's and in the Evergreen category, with path auto you can have nice URL's like /plants/evergreen/shrubs, which would automatically list all plants that are evergreen and shrubs, that's the power of Drupal! And that's only one quick idea of how you could organize things. :D

You can even have other people contribute to the site and moderate their entries.

Hope this helps you decide, it would be nice to see your site running in Drupal.

Organize:
http://drupal.org/project/views

Member Pages:
http://drupal.org/project/nodefamily
http://drupal.org/project/nodeprofile
http://drupal.org/project/usernode
or
http://drupal.org/project/mysite
also
Check Blog.module that comes with Drupal

Photo Gallery:
http://drupal.org/project/gallery2 works with http://gallery.menalto.com/
http://drupal.org/project/acidfree

and User Contribution are all possible, check the modules page under downloads for more.