A senior colleague of mine once said that "If someone published an accurate tree of life and put it on a poster just outside his door, he probably wouldn't bother to stop and look at it." David Penny didn't go quite that far, but always acknowledged that phylogenies weren't interesting in and of themselves, but rather for what they can tell us about macroevolution. These days there are a wealth of other data sources that can (and should) be integrated with phylogenies. For example, databases like TRY and AusTraits contain information on1000's of plant traits across tens of thousands of taxa. Geographical information systems allow us to match environmental data such as mean annual temperature and precipitation to species ranges. It is becoming increasingly affordable to gather transcriptomic data across multiple species. In this talk I will survey some of the ways we have been trying to use these kinds of data within the Centre for Plant Success and what we see as some of the open problems.