A library that goes and learns what it doesn’t know
Every plant catalogue has a long tail it has never researched. Ours closes the gap on demand: add a plant we hold only a name for and it goes and reads up on it, in about five seconds. Only if that genuinely fails do we say we don’t know.
The long tail doesn’t stay untouched
Look closely at any plant database and you’ll find the same shape: a handful of deeply researched plants, and a very long tail of names. The difference is what happens when you reach into that tail.
The middle number is a floor, not a ceiling. It counts the plants researched in advance — and it climbs every time somebody adds a plant from the tail, because that add triggers a real lookup rather than a shrug.
Add a plant we don’t know and we go and find out
Most plants on Earth have never been written up for home growing. The lazy options are to guess, or to shrug. We do a third thing: the moment you actually add one, the app goes and researches it — and about five seconds later the record has real care data in it.
Rare plants are looked up the moment they’re added — roughly five seconds, and the plant is yours either way.
Search the name you know, not the one a botanist knows
Common names are regional, marketing names are invented, and botanical names get revised. All of them have to land on the same record or the app is useless in a garden centre.
1A climbing aroid grown indoors for its perforated leaves. Wants bright indirect light, moderate watering, and something to climb.
2Harmful to cats and dogs if chewed. Birds have not been assessed, so we don’t claim either way.
Outdated botanical names matter more than they sound: nurseries print them for years after a revision, so the label in your hand is often a name the plant no longer officially has.
Nobody browses by botanical family
Taxonomy is how a catalogue is organised; it is not how anyone chooses a plant. So records also carry how the plant is actually grown — which is the way you’d ask for it in a shop.
The indoor survivors — aroids, palms, ferns and the ones that tolerate a north window.
Grown for how they look: flowering shrubs, foliage colour, structure.
Beds, borders and pots outdoors — where your real weather does the work.
Species that take training and pruning without sulking about it.
A plant can sit in several at once — plenty of garden plants make fine house plants, and saying so is more useful than forcing one label.
A record isn’t a page. It’s an input.
This is the part a browsable list could never do. The same handful of fields feeds four different things at once, which is why the app’s answers agree with each other.
- Your watering schedule starts from the species’ own thirst, then bends with your weather.
- Placement scoring compares the light your corner measured against what this plant needs.
- Herb quotes it verbatim — and on the rare field a lookup still can’t fill, so does he.
- Shop suggestions filter on the actual problem instead of a category guess.
What people ask about the data
Can I browse the whole catalogue on this site?
No — the library lives in the app, where it does actual work: identifying your photo, driving a watering schedule, answering a question about your plant. A website list of names wouldn't do any of that.
How do you decide a record is “verified”?
Records researched up front and cross-checked carry the most weight. Ones filled in on demand when someone adds the plant sit a step below, and both are marked, so the app knows how firmly to speak about each.
What if my plant isn't profiled yet?
Add it and the app goes and researches it there and then — usually about five seconds, and the plant is added either way. If that lookup genuinely comes back empty, the missing fields stay marked as missing rather than being filled with a guess.
Do you make up the missing data with AI?
We research it, which is not the same thing. Adding an unprofiled plant triggers a real lookup that writes verifiable care fields into the record. What we never do is let a downstream feature invent a value on the spot — if the lookup found nothing, the chat, the diagnosis and the shop all have to work around the gap rather than paper over it.
How current is it?
Botanical names get revised over time, so records carry accepted names alongside the older ones people still use, and the catalogue is refreshed as revisions land.
Is pet-safety data complete?
Nowhere near, and no honest source claims otherwise. Tens of thousands of species carry a safety record; the rest are marked not assessed, which is a real answer rather than a gap dressed up as “safe”.
The library is only useful with a plant in front of it
Reading about a catalogue proves nothing. Point the camera at the thing on your windowsill and see what comes back — including, sometimes, an honest “we haven’t profiled this one”.
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