Pardon me — it is actually
Garden Me
Your plants are pleading. You simply cannot hear them. We can.
In the aisle, before you buy it. In the garden, for years afterwards.
Outdoors and indoors both. An acre, a balcony, a greenhouse, the shared courtyard of a housing association — or a flat with no ground at all, where the garden is a windowsill and the weather is a window. You say which, and the app becomes a different app.
Photograph anything green and learn what it is, what it wants, and — before you part with your money — how much work it will actually be. Then year-round care, pest stewardship and weather alerts, for the devoted gardener and the serial offender alike. No judgement. Very little, anyway.
Free to download, with ten actions to begin. No subscription required. Side effects may include keeping things alive.
What it offers
Everything the garden requires.
Rain excepted. We have tried; the heavens are uncooperative.
Plant Detective
Photograph any plant and receive an identification down to the cultivar where the evidence allows — not merely 'apple tree', but which apple tree. Leaf, bark, fruit and habit all considered.
Write It Down for Nothing
Not every plant needs identifying. If you already know it is a rhubarb, type “rhubarb” and it costs you nothing at all — no photograph, no action spent, no ceremony. Record the whole garden for free, and save the asking for the ones you genuinely wonder about.
The Quiet Reminder
Year-round care notifications for every plant you own. We tell you when to prune, water, and feed — so nothing is discovered, browned and lifeless, come October.
The Garden Devils
Slugs, weeds, invasive species, disease. Identify your adversaries, track their advance, and receive removal advice — natural methods only. The slugs do not deserve a war crime. Each one belongs to the plant you found it on, rather than floating loose in the garden, and each one puts its own jobs on your list: knowing about the aphids was never the hard part, remembering to go back out on Thursday was. There is advice on what to plant against them, too, because the longest answer to a pest is usually another plant.
Uninvited Guests
The roe deer strips a newly planted apple in its first winter, and by the time there is damage worth photographing the tree is already finished. So we name who is coming before they arrive — deer, elk, voles, hares — and what to do about it, with measurements. Mesh width, guard height, the month it must be standing. Not merely “protect from deer”.
Ailments Worth Recognising
A reminder that says “watch for silver leaf in August” is no use whatever to somebody who has never seen silver leaf. So every plant carries the illnesses that actually threaten it: what you will see, in the order you will notice it, and the one test that settles the matter — cut a dying branch and look for the dark stain in the wood.
Damage Forensics
The culprit has fled, but the evidence remains. Photograph a half-eaten leaf and we deduce the offender — slug, caterpillar, beetle or blight — from the holes, the trails, the telltale spots.
Should You Even Buy It?
Standing in the garden centre, holding something beautiful and expensive. Photograph it before you commit and we will tell you plainly what it demands of you — watering, pruning, winter coddling — and how forgiving it is when you forget. Photograph the label rather than the leaves if you like: a printed cultivar name beats any amount of squinting at foliage. Some plants are a joy. Some are a second job.
Knows Its Age — And Keeps Track
Tag each plant as freshly planted, settling in, or well established. A seedling and a veteran want entirely different things — and only one of them is permitted to be dramatic about it. It then grows up on its own: we count growing seasons, not calendar days, because nothing puts down roots in February.
Pot, Bed, Greenhouse or Windowsill
A potted bay dries out in a day; the border two metres away holds water for a week. Under glass it never rains at all, and the pests are entirely different ones. Tell us where each plant actually stands and the advice changes accordingly — not the garden in general, this plant in particular.
Sun, or the Lack of It
We ask where the plant stands, not merely what it would prefer. When the two disagree, we say so in the first breath — what it wants, what it is getting, and precisely how that ends.
A Link for the Neighbour
Going away? Share the garden as a web page. Whoever is watering will see what needs doing, how much is too much, and a photograph of every plant — so “the one by the shed” need never be attempted over a bad line from the airport. No app, no account, no explanation required.
"No, That Is Wrong"
You know your own garden. Reject an identification and Garden Me starts the reasoning over — never offering the same answer twice, and telling you which visible detail separates the new guess from the one you ruled out. You may also simply say what you think it is: “this is a plum tree, I am fairly certain” is treated as the strongest evidence in the room, because you are standing next to it and we are not. Being corrected costs you nothing. It rather ought not to.
What the Season Is Hiding
Every identification knows what month it is where you are standing, and that changes what it can honestly claim. A photograph taken in August, six weeks after the flowering that would have settled the question, is a harder photograph than the same plant in June — not because the app is having a bad day, but because the evidence is not there. So it says so, in a sentence, and names what would settle it and when that comes back: photograph it again in June and you will know. It cuts the other way too. A plant is not suspicious for looking dormant in November, or for having no fruit in March, and Garden Me will not lower its confidence merely because a plant looks the way it is supposed to look this month. An honest sentence about the one missing clue is worth more than a number nobody can act on.
What to Sow, and When
Every gardening app tells you how to look after the plants you already own. This one also tells you what to put in the ground this month — five to eight things worth sowing where you live, in the setting you actually have, with sowing depth and spacing in real numbers rather than a vague handful. January on a Norwegian windowsill is chilli, aubergine and celery, going out in June. August in the open ground is spinach, autumn radish and kale. Under glass it is a different list on the same day, which is rather the point of glass.
What the Garden Gave Back
Two kilos of tomatoes on the eleventh. Twelve courgettes nobody asked for. Keep a running note of what you actually picked, and the season adds itself up in the corner of the plant's page — and then the year before it, and the one before that, so a tree that has been in the ground six years can tell you what it gave in each of them. That is the number no gardener ever has and every gardener wants: not what an apple tree yields in theory, but what yours did. We will happily tell you what you harvested from the plant you planted — and we will still never tell you whether something you found is safe to eat, because being wrong about that is a different order of wrong.
The Allotment
Schrebergarten, volkstuin, kolonihave, kolonilott — several of our languages have a word for it and a culture behind it, and it is not a garden. It is a rented plot you reach twice a week, worked in rows, mostly annuals, with a shared tap, no shed and a committee with opinions. So the watering advice assumes four days of absence, crop rotation becomes real advice rather than theory, tools are the ones that fit in a bag, and nothing permanent is suggested without noting that your site may not permit it.
The Garden Heroes
Every garden has a workforce, and most of it is never thanked. Bees, bumblebees, ladybirds, hoverflies, lacewings, earthworms, spiders, hedgehogs, toads and the ground beetle that eats slug eggs out of the soil in April — a slug you never meet being the cheapest slug you will ever have. Garden Me keeps a page for them beside the one for the Gremlins, because the difference is worth stating plainly: gremlins arrive uninvited and eat your plants, and heroes arrive uninvited and eat the ones eating your plants.
Employee of the Month
One of them is picked each month — not the one you are most likely to see, but the one that most needs you right now. In June the ladybird, because the aphids have arrived. In October the hedgehog, looking for somewhere to sleep the winter away. You get one explanation and one small thing to do: leave the leaf pile, put water out, let the seed heads stand. The seasons turn the right way round below the equator, and nobody suggests a hedgehog to a fourth-floor balcony.
Who to Plant Beside It
Open any plant and it will tell you which welcome creatures it wants nearby, what to plant to bring them, and how far away to put it — a real measurement, not “nearby”. And if the plant cannot set fruit from its own pollen, which many apples, plums and pears cannot, it says so and names the cultivars that will do it. That sentence is the difference between an apple tree and an apple tree with apples on it.
The Soil It Actually Wants
Acid, neutral, or happy with lime. Clay, sand, or something in between. Wrong soil is the commonest way a plant dies after wrong watering, and the cruellest, because it takes two years and you blame yourself. In a pot you are told which compost to buy and how much. In the ground you are told how to work out what you have, what to dig in — or, honestly, that the plant belongs somewhere else.
A Name of Your Own
The app has to call you something, and "gardener" is what a form calls you. So give yourself a name instead — Tom the Garden Gnome, Her Ladyship of the Compost Heap, whatever you can defend at a dinner party — and it will use it. Once a week you will be addressed by a title you invented, which is a small and unreasonable pleasure, and there is no earthly reason an app should not offer it.
Put Them in the Order You Want
The heart floats a favourite to the top, which is a sensible default and remains the default — right up until the first time you move a plant yourself. From that moment the order is yours and the heart goes back to being merely a heart, because two rules quarrelling over one list gives you the worst of both: you drag the rose to the top and the app puts it back, on the grounds that it is not marked. Three buttons rather than a long press and a drag — to the top, up one, down one — all reachable with a thumb while the other hand holds something muddy. Anything planted after you have arranged matters has no place yet, and queues politely at the end. The same three buttons, and the same search, now sit over the garden guests as well — both the heroes and the gremlins, which arrive in whatever order the camera happened to give them and become just as numerous. Searching them looks at the type as well as the name, because nobody remembers “Arion vulgaris”; they remember that it was a slug. The task list and the shopping list are deliberately left alone: a task list is already sorted by what is urgent, and offering to re-sort it by name would only let you break the one order that means anything.
The Wishlist
You found something in the woods, in a shop, or in a friend’s garden, and you are not taking it home today. Scan it anyway and put it on the list, with the photograph and an honest note on how much work it will be. Each one can say what it is waiting for — money, room, or time — because that is almost always the reason it stayed on the shelf.
Outdoors or Indoors, and Then What Kind
The first question is not what you grow but where it stands, because that one answer changes everything after it. Outdoors there are six: a garden, a terrace, a balcony, a greenhouse, an allotment, and the shared ground of a housing association where the gardener is a committee. Indoors there is one, and it covers more than it sounds like — a house, a flat, or a cabin you visit at weekends; houseplants, herbs on the windowsill, anything that lives inside. Choose indoors and the frost warnings go away, the mulching advice goes away, and an indoor calendar that runs on light rather than temperature takes their place. Most households are honestly both, and you may keep one of each: they are separate gardens, each with its own name, and the app never confuses one for the other.
The Greenhouse Is Its Own Country
Most plant apps treat a greenhouse as a garden that happens to be warmer. It is not. It is a room with a roof, walls and its own weather, and almost everything changes at the door. No rain gets in, so every drop of water for the whole year is yours to carry. The season opens earlier and closes later. The afternoon runs far hotter than the forecast promises, which makes ventilating and shading real work rather than an afterthought. Still, humid air breeds mildew, botrytis and damping off. The pests are whitefly, spider mite and thrips — the ones that flourish precisely because their predators are outside, on the wrong side of the glass. And the pollinators are out there too, which is why a greenhouse tomato may need the vents open at flowering, or its flowers tapped by hand. Set a greenhouse up as its own garden and every plant inside it is advised accordingly, without your having to say so twice. An unheated greenhouse still freezes in January, and Garden Me will not pretend otherwise.
Houseplants Have a Season Too
The app spent its first summer assuming you had ground. Plenty of people do not, and a monstera in a flat in February is not a lesser garden — it is simply one where the weather is a window. Choose houseplants and the whole app moves indoors: no frost warnings for a plant that lives on your bookshelf, no advice to mulch, no pests that arrive on the wind. What arrives instead is the indoor year, which nobody tells you about, because it runs on light rather than on temperature. The busiest month inside is the darkest one. The month to repot is not the month you feel like repotting. Watering is the thing most often done too much, and the reason is almost always that the plant slowed down in November and its owner did not. Garden Me keeps an indoor calendar of seven jobs and tells you which one belongs to this month — and it works in January, which is more than any garden can say.
The Garden Nobody Owns
Sameier og borettslag — the courtyard, the hedge along the road, the beds by the bicycle shed. This is a garden with a committee instead of a gardener, and three things follow from that, all of which change the advice. Nobody owns it, so the work happens on a communal day twice a year: what matters is not what rewards weekly attention but what survives being left alone between those days, and the app will say plainly when a job needs a contractor rather than a Saturday. Children play there, so anything toxic or thorny is named out loud rather than buried in a footnote. And the board changes: whoever reads the advice will one day hand it to somebody who did not plant any of it and was not there, so it is written to still make sense then — the plant named, the month named, nothing left as “as before”. Costs come out of a shared budget and appear on a line in the annual accounts, so the shopping list says how much, not merely what. Twelve characters move the whole garden to the next board member’s telephone, photographs and all.
Two Phones, One Garden
A garden is usually kept by two people, and the app has spent its life insisting it belonged to a telephone. Now it does not: one code of twelve characters, typed into the other phone, and you are tending the same garden. No account, no email, no invitation — there is nobody to sign up as. Both phones hold the whole garden and work without a signal; the server only keeps the last thing you agreed on. She adds the plum tree, you tick off the pruning, and each sees the other. The photographs travel too, so the plant she bought this morning is not an empty frame on your side of the kitchen table. And if a merge ever looks wrong, one button puts the garden back exactly as it stood before it. One thing the code does not carry is the subscription: the garden is shared, the plan is not. Each phone keeps its own actions, so you see the same garden but you each ask for yourselves — which is worth knowing before the second phone reaches its first wall and assumes the sharing is broken.
Tell It What You Already Know
Before you press identify, there is a line where you can simply say what you think it is. Type “plum tree” and the question stops being whether it is a plum tree and becomes which plum tree — which is the question actually worth an answer. You are standing at the thing and can see its bark, its habit and what it did last summer; the app has one photograph taken from one angle, and an ambiguous photograph is precisely what your sentence is for. Being roughly right is fine too: say “plum” when it is a cherry plum and it will keep what you got right and sharpen the rest rather than throwing the whole statement away. Leave it empty and nothing changes. The app could always be told this — but only after it had already guessed wrong and you had pressed “no, that is not it”, which was using the best evidence in the whole request last.
Shut It Out
Against a roe deer there is no such thing as safe removal — you do not remove a roe deer. You shut it out. Because this app refuses chemicals, a barrier is not one option among several here: it is the one thing that works, and it happens to be entirely organic. So you are told the mesh width, the height, how far out from the trunk — never merely “netting”, which is not advice — and, more to the point, the deadline. A vole guard goes on before the first snow, and if you are late the ringing happens underneath it where nobody can see, and the tree is found dead in May. Bird netting goes up when the fruit colours rather than when it ripens; the difference is a few days and a whole crop. That deadline becomes a reminder in the right month. You are also told what the barrier itself can do wrong, because loose netting kills hedgehogs and a tree guard left on for years strangles the trunk it was protecting.
The Partner It Cannot Fruit Without
Many apples, plums, pears and sea buckthorns set no fruit at all from their own pollen. The app has always said so — and then done nothing about it, which was the useless half. Now the requirement goes onto your wish list with one tap, because it is a thing to buy, the deadline is “before you plant”, and being late costs a year. What it names is the requirement rather than a cultivar: a male sea buckthorn within fifty to a hundred metres, or simply another variety flowering at the same time. Cultivar names are the easiest thing in gardening to get confidently wrong, and being wrong here means you buy the plant, wait a season and harvest nothing. We would rather be less specific and right.
Hard to Kill
For anyone standing in front of an empty garden with no idea where to begin. Every other way into this app asks you to know something first — a photograph needs you standing in front of the plant, a name needs you to know the name. This one asks nothing. It is a short list of plants that survive being forgotten in your country, in your kind of garden, and it costs no action at all. Not “easy to grow”, which is a garden centre phrase meaning nothing: each one must survive a fortnight with nobody there, need no pollination partner, not be the first thing a deer eats where you live, need no pruning skill, and actually be sold near you — a safe bet nobody stocks is not a safe bet. And each one tells you the single way you can still kill it, because everything difficult to kill has exactly one weakness, and a list that hid it would be lying to the person trusting it most.
A Garden Here, a Cabin There
Keep as many gardens as you have places, and give each one its own country. The cabin in Finland is then told about Finnish winters rather than about yours, and a garden below the equator is not warned of frost in July — the seasons turn the right way round on their own. Switch between them from the header; every reminder, warning and piece of advice follows.
Lists That Write Themselves
Shopping and equipment lists, composed automatically from what your garden actually contains. Each item tied to a specific plant or pest. No generic 'buy fertiliser'. The real kind.
And the Things Only You Know
Everything else here is worked out for you — the year wheel from what you planted, the shopping list from what your garden actually contains. But a garden always holds something the app cannot possibly know. Ask your father about the apple tree. Move the pot before Saturday. More compost for the greenhouse. So you can write your own tasks and your own shopping items, and they sit in the same two lists as everything else. A task can take a month, and then it becomes a reminder like any other; leave the month off and it simply means now, which is the commonest and the most honest answer to when something needs doing. It can be tied to a particular plant, and then it appears on that plant’s page too. Both lists travel to the other phone, because “more compost” helps nobody if only one of you can see it. None of it costs an action — charging you to write down your own thought would be as odd as charging you to note a plant you already recognise. The point is not the feature. It is that an app which keeps your whole garden but cannot hold your next thought about it sends you to a notes app, and the notes app wins.
Ask Garden Me
A conversation with your personal AI gardener — shy, but endlessly knowledgeable. Ask anything: why the leaves are yellow, when to divide the irises, whether that's a friend or a foe. No question too small.
Light Check
Hold up your phone to a corner and we judge the light it receives — then suggest what would actually thrive there. The feature other apps lock behind a paywall. Here, it simply comes along.
The Garden Journal
A diary for every plant. Photograph the first bud, the first bloom, the triumphant first tomato. Watch the seasons accumulate. Sentimental? Perhaps. But a garden is a slow story worth keeping.
Safe & Sound
Every plant flagged for toxicity to cats, dogs, and curious children. Know at a glance whether the new arrival is a gentle houseguest or quietly plotting against the family pet.
Weather Watch
Push alerts when frost, drought, or heavy rain threatens your particular garden — even when you have not opened the app in a fortnight and forgotten the garden exists. A frost warning is checked twice: once in the morning, and once again in the late afternoon against tonight’s minimum, because a warning that arrives after the frost is a weather report, and one that arrives while you can still carry the pots in is a warning. It costs nothing — the weather is never counted against your actions, however cold it gets.
Ten Languages
Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, English, German, Dutch, French, Polish, Finnish and Italian — with climate-aware advice for each country. The plants care nothing for borders. We care, a little.
Powered by Claude AI
Not the kind of AI that insists a cactus needs daily watering. The kind that knows a rose from a ranunculus — and has the grace to admit when it is uncertain.
Two places, one app
In the garden centre. And then at home.
Most garden apps assume the plant is already yours. Rather a lot of gardening happens before that — standing in an aisle, wondering.
Before you buy
Photograph it on the shelf. Learn what it is, what light it wants, and — the question nobody else answers — how much work it will actually be. Then put it back, or do not. We shall not judge either way, though the plant might.
Once it is yours
Tell us where it stands — pot or bed, sun or shade, greenhouse or windowsill — and the care becomes specific to that plant in that spot. Then the reminders begin, and carry on quietly for years.
While you are away
Your neighbour is willing.
Your neighbour is not psychic.
Send them a link. They will see exactly what wants doing this week, which plant is which, and how much water is in fact too much — in an ordinary browser, with no app to install and no account to invent. They need never learn the word cultivar.
The link keeps working if you share again, and quietly expires when the holiday is long over. Whether the tomatoes survive your uncle remains, as ever, between you and your uncle.
For every green space
From a single pot to a teeming plant kingdom.
You need not own an acre to be a gardener. Whether you tend one brave geranium on a city balcony, a cluster of pots on a terrace, a single monstera on a bookshelf in a flat with no ground at all, or a sprawling, opulent realm of green — Garden Me fits every size, and tailors its advice to the soil you actually have.
The Garden Devils
Every garden has its adversaries. Slugs that materialise after rain like small, gelatinous opportunists. Weeds with more ambition than one’s houseplants. We help you identify them, track them, and prevail — by natural means alone.
And when the offender has already slipped away? Photograph the damage instead. From the holes, the slime trails, the spotted leaves, we name the most likely suspect — slug, caterpillar, beetle or blight.
Active after rain. Ravenous. Slow, yet deeply committed.
They were here first. They intend to be here last.
Small. Numerous. Famished for your hostas.
Damp weather’s most persistent houseguest.
We never recommend harmful chemicals — neither for your garden nor the little rascals. Every method we suggest is natural, organic, and kind to the soil. Hand-picking, copper tape, beer traps, companion planting.
A garden at war with itself is no garden at all.
And should it all become too much — there is an “I surrender” button that summons professional gardeners nearby. No shame. Only survival.
For whom
Who is Garden Me for?
You, in all likelihood.
You hold opinions on soil pH and acquire plants before deciding where they shall live. Garden Me brings order to your magnificent chaos.
You inherited a garden and are doing your best. Garden Me tells you what things are, what they require, and whether the moment calls for panic.
You visit the cabin four times a year, and something always perishes in between. With weather alerts and care reminders — perhaps not this year.
What it costs
How much garden have you got?
The app itself is free. Every reminder, the whole year’s calendar, the pest tracking, the journal, the weather, sharing the garden with your household or with a neighbour — all of it, for everyone, always.
One thing costs: asking the app to think. Identifying a plant from a photograph, asking Garden Me a question, checking the light in a corner. We call those actions, and you begin with ten.
One thing is a subscriber’s: the shopping list. Every other answer we work out once and share with everybody who asks the same question — but no two gardens are composed alike, so yours is written from scratch each time it changes. It comes with Garden Me +, or you can buy a single list for one action, with the price on the button before you press it.
Most of them go at the start. Loading a garden of twenty plants costs about twenty actions, and then it goes quiet — a settled garden asks for five or ten in a month, and rather fewer in January. Being told we got something wrong costs nothing at all.
And most of the app is not counted at all. The garden itself, the year wheel, the watering reminders, the journal, the harvest log, the wish list, sharing a garden with the person you actually share it with, the frost and drought warnings — none of those cost an action, none of them ever will, and they keep working whether you pay us or not. Only what we have to look at or think about is counted.
Subscription
Gardener on hand
Here all year, not only when something has gone wrong. Sixty actions a month is enough that you stop counting — room to load a whole border in one sitting, work out what is eating the roses, and still have plenty left when something unexpected turns up in August.
And if one month turns out unusual — you move house, or plant a whole border in a weekend — you buy extra for that month alone, without changing anything. What you buy never expires. There is no deadline running against you, and nothing to use up before the first.
49 kr / 4,49 € a month
or 499 kr / 44,99 € a year
One-off
Or nothing at all, until you need something.
The app is free, and stays free. You begin with ten actions and three more arrive at the start of every month, for as long as you have the app — and when you want a run of them at once you can buy them outright, from 49 kr / 4,49 € for twenty. They never expire, there is nothing to renew and nothing to remember to cancel. Some gardens want attention twice a year and then nothing until spring, and we shall not bill you monthly for that.
Yes, twenty actions costs about what a month of the subscription does, and the subscription would give you sixty. That is not a mistake. A subscription is always the better rate — that is rather the point of one. What you are buying instead is the absence of a subscription: twenty actions that will still be there next April, with nothing to cancel in between.
Prices shown in kroner and euro; the App Store will quote you in your own currency, which we are told is the civilised arrangement. Swedish and Danish kroner are close cousins of the Norwegian, and Apple works out the difference.
Notices from the garden
What the garden is saying
Reviews from actual plants. And one slug.
"I requested water for six weeks. Nobody listened. Then they installed the app. Alas, too late for me."
— A fern, formerly
"I personally required no assistance. My owner, however, required a great deal."
— A very smug cactus
"Dreadful. They located me at once and relocated me humanely. Where is the sport in that?"
— A brown slug
"A frost warning arrived at ten in the evening. I was covered. I survived. I owe this app my marinara."
— A tomato plant
"At last, someone who knows precisely when to prune. The audacity I had endured until now."
— A rose bush
"Would not recommend. Registered as a 'Garden Devil'. The disrespect. The accuracy."
— An anonymous weed
A universal affliction
"Green fingers."
"Grønne fingre."
"Gröna fingrar."
"Grüner Daumen."
"Groene vingers."
Every language has a phrase for the gift of growing things — and a polite silence regarding the soil beneath the nails. Whether yours are green by nature or merely by enthusiasm, Garden Me makes them a little greener.
The garden calls. You answer.
Garden Me observes the weather and sends word when attention is required — frost warnings, slug weather, drought, the first stirrings of spring.
Even if you have not opened the app since last Tuesday. Especially then.
Shall we keep things alive?
Download Garden Me. The garden will notice. The ferns may weep with relief.