The garden is trying to tell you something. I have built an app that translates.

By Magnus Bjelkerud

There are people who know exactly when a lilac should be pruned. They know the pH of their soil. They hold strong opinions about compost.

Garden Me is for them too.

But they are not who I had in mind. I was thinking of the rest of us.

Those of us who plant an apple tree and, six months later, wonder why it looks personally offended.

Those of us who water because the leaves are drooping, and then water a little more because they are still drooping.

Those of us who see an insect on a rose and think: spray?

Garden Me works on a fairly simple principle: do not spray first and ask afterwards. Find out who actually lives there.

The garden is full of guests

Some are less welcome than others. We call them Gremlins. Slugs. Aphids. Diseases. Things with an almost impressive gift for finding the one plant you were proudest of.

But then there are the others. The bees. The ladybirds. The earthworms. The spiders. The hedgehogs. The Garden Heroes.

The difference can be put quite simply:

Gremlins arrive uninvited and eat your plants.

Heroes arrive uninvited and eat the ones eating your plants.

In the app they live together, under Garden Guests. That is deliberate: you should see both at once, rather than choosing your way into one room.

Nature is not a collection of individual plants. It is a system. And once you begin to see the system, the question stops being only how do I get rid of this? It also becomes: what should I take care to keep? That is a rather important difference.

Sometimes the best gardening is to leave it alone

A garden does not always need more effort. Sometimes it needs less.

Let the seed heads stand a little longer. Leave some leaves where they fell. Put out water when it is hot and dry. Give the ladybird a week at the aphids before the chemistry department is called in. Do not tidy away every place where something might live.

And perhaps leave that pile of leaves alone in October. A hedgehog may have submitted an application.

So in Garden Me the Heroes have a place of their own, with an Employee of the Month. Not because the hedgehog needs recognition on LinkedIn, but because timing matters. When the aphids arrive, the ladybird is relevant. When the pollinators need feeding, flowering is relevant. When winter approaches, other species need food, cover and somewhere to see it out.

One hero. One explanation. One small thing you can do right now. That is how knowledge turns into gardening.

The plants are already talking

The trouble is that their vocabulary is somewhat limited.

Yellow leaf. Brown leaf. Hole in leaf. No leaf.

Garden Me exists to help with the translation. Photograph a plant and the app tries to work out what it is. Say where it stands, and the advice is fitted to the actual plant in the actual place. Sun or shade. Pot or border. Greenhouse or windowsill. Newly planted or long established.

It follows the weather and speaks up when frost, drought or heavy rain means your garden in particular could do with some attention. It can help you understand what is eating your plant, what the plant is trying to tell you, when it ought to be pruned — and, perhaps more usefully, when it absolutely ought not to be.

And when you are standing in the garden centre holding something beautiful that costs 1,499 kr, you can ask Garden Me before you buy it how much work it is going to be.

Some plants are a joy. Others are a part-time job.

Why I am building this now

Europe is getting hotter. Our towns are made of more and more asphalt and concrete — materials remarkably good at holding heat and remarkably poor at flowering.

Trees, planting and living soil do the opposite. They cast shade. They cool. They hold water. They give insects and birds somewhere to be.

A tree, in other words, is not decoration.

It is infrastructure with leaves.

And it is not only about heat. The insects are disappearing — not slowly, and not somewhere else.

That is the part where a garden actually counts. As a carbon store your apple tree is close to meaningless, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. As somewhere to live it is not. Private gardens make up a great deal of the green in a town, and they lie end to end, garden after garden, the whole way down the street.

For a bumblebee that is not a garden. It is a corridor.

And this is not only about the council's trees. It is about your garden. The balcony. The housing association. The cabin. The bed outside the office. The faintly sad planter outside the restaurant that nobody quite remembers being responsible for.

We have to plant. But we also have to keep alive what we plant. A large old tree cannot be replaced next Tuesday by a new one of 180 centimetres from a garden centre, however optimistic the label looks.

It sounds almost embarrassingly obvious. It is nevertheless harder than it ought to be.

The world will not be saved by a watering can

Garden Me is not going to solve the climate crisis. That would be a somewhat forward claim for a gardening app. And responsibility for the climate, for nature and for decent towns cannot, obviously, be handed to people who happen to own a hydrangea.

We need policy. We need better town planning. We need to keep the large trees and the nature we still have. We need nature where people actually live.

But large changes are also made of a great many small decisions. Whether we plant or do not. Whether the tree lives or comes down. Whether we choose a plant that actually suits the place. Whether we let the flowers stand for the pollinators. Whether we reach for chemicals by reflex — or first find out what the problem actually is. Whether a garden is a little more alive next year than it was this year.

One action is small. Millions of them are not.

More life gives more life

I think we have long seen the garden as something to be controlled. The lawn belongs there. The weeds do not. The rose will flower on command. The slug has evidently misunderstood the entire arrangement.

But perhaps a good garden is not the one we have complete control over. Perhaps it is the one we have learned to work with.

A garden with fruit trees, berries, flowers, birds, pollinators, earthworms and all the other small systems that keep it going gives something back. Sometimes apples. Sometimes blueberries. Sometimes only a bumblebee that turns up because you left the right flower standing.

That is a return as well.

This is Garden Me

Garden Me is my small translator between people and the things growing around us. It should help you understand what you have. What it needs. What is wrong. What is not wrong. Who ought to stay. And who ought, gently, to be shown the door.

No wagging finger. No expectation of green fingers. And no recommendation to open chemical hostilities because something has eaten half a leaf off the hosta.

Only a little more knowledge. Slightly better timing. And, with luck, a little more life.

Because if we want greener towns, living gardens and more nature around us, this is perhaps a rather good place to begin:

Learn to listen to what is already growing there.

Norsk