Growing your own isolation indoor jungle is all sun and games, until you enthusiastically over-water that peace lily on the top shelf of the living room bookcase.
The capital’s succulent obsession is blossoming amid the lockdown, but for amateur botanists, plant parenting can be a minefield: which species to buy, which rooms to leave them in, how often to feed them.
Keeping your plants alive might be harder than it looks when you’re staying at home all day, but the smartest indoor gardeners aren’t trawling Google or DM-ing plantfluencers on Instagram: a stream of apps and gadgets can do the hard work for you.
From AI that reminds you to water your windowsill to video consultations with your cacti, this is your hi-tech plant care guide.
Pocket botanists
Don’t know your agapanthus from your aloe vera? PlantSnap (free, plantsnap.com) will be your hero. The app, from nature site Earth.com, currently has 90 per cent of all known plant species on its database and builds its algorithm using the 200,000 anonymous images taken by its users every day.
For green-fingered novices, this makes it the ultimate identification tool: just take a picture of your birthday bouquet or a flower in the park and PlantSnap will name the species in seconds and overlay it with augmented reality animations to teach you more.
SmartPlant (free, smartplantapp.com) works similarly. Its premium version connects you with expert gardeners to identify your plant or pest for you, while PictureThis’s Plant Identifier (free, picturethisai.com) uses AI to detect plants with 98 per cent accuracy and automatically diagnoses their problems.
Smart sunflowers
That dark corner of your bedroom doesn’t have to be off-limits for green goodness: Florish’s “wizard” tool scans the light in any room and suggests plants that would (and wouldn’t) thrive in that space. Ficus for shady rooms, succulents for your windowsill (free, apps.apple.com).
Plant Optimiser (free, apps.apple.com) uses AI to assess whether your plant babies are getting enough sunlight, while Sun Surveyor Lite (free, apps.apple.com) uses your location to track how sunlight will vary hour by hour.
Place your phone in the spot you plan to put your plant and you’ll get an AR view of the sun’s movement throughout the day. For a light boost, try an AeroGarden Farm (£480, aerogarden.com). The WiFi-connected and Alexa-enabled indoor growing machine uses two 60-watt LED lights to help up to 24 plant or herb babies reach maturity five times faster than using soil.
Nature nannies
“Never kill a plant again,” promises Planta, which not only catalogues your plants and seeks out the best light conditions, but reminds you to water them too (free, apps.apple.com).
You’ll get a notification each time you need to water, fertilise, mist, clean and repot each one. Vera also wants to be your “plant nanny”, sending watering reminders according to each plant’s type and location (free, veraplantcareapp.com), while Happy Plant turns care into a game (free, happyplantapp.com). Give each plant baby a nickname, add a selfie update each time you’ve watered them, achieve watering “streaks” and the app will create a time-lapse video of your plants’ growth over time.
It’s not just apps that are doing the hard work for you. Kikkerland’s translucent Water From A Crystal device sits in your flower pot and drips water into the soil over the course of three to four days (£14, kikkerland.com), while the Bluetooth-connected FYTA Beam sensor, currently funding on Indiegogo, tracks water, fertiliser, heat and light and sends you alerts when your plant needs some love (£31, fyta.de).
Social seeds
There’s more to green-fingered chat than posting garden snaps on Instagram. MyGarden’s app wants to be the Goodreads of gardening by sharing your plant progress with other users: update your garden status, scroll your feed and share plant-care tips with friends (free, mygarden.org).
For an expert take, Horticure’s on-demand plant-care service hooks you up with plant specialists in 72 hours over a video consultation (from £42 a month, horticure.com). “Most of the specialists have degrees in horticulture, agriculture or botany,” explains founder Deborah Choir, who launched the service for busy urbanites in London, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, San Francisco and New York.
Others act as soil-loving social networks: GrowIt! and Candide Gardening are like Instagram for botanists (free, growitmobile.com; candidegardening.com), Greenterest is a plant Pinterest (free, moralfibres.co.uk), and Data
Garden’s PlantWave turns your plants into music (£200, plantwave.com). The device, currently on Kickstarter, connects to your chosen foliage, detects slight electrical variations in the leaf and translates this into pitch messages and notes to create your very own concerto.
A new meaning to connecting to nature.
