BloomsEye528 / 1,702checked

528of 1,702

Verification in progress

Plant verification tracker

Fully verified so far: 0 of 1,702. Source-checked: 528. The standard below says exactly what each word means, field by field, and this page moves as the work does.

Every source-checked plant here has been read against about eight independent botanical sources, including the RHS, Missouri Botanical Garden and NC State Extension, one plant at a time, with each claim recorded next to the source it came from. A claim with no source is discarded rather than used. "Fully verified" is a higher bar than that, and its honest count is published above, however small it reads.

We're working through the full library of 1,702 plants, and this page updates as each check completes. The rest of it says exactly what each word does, and does not, mean.

What the checkmark means

Source-checked, in one sentence: this plant's measurable facts have been checked against named botanical authorities, with every claim recorded next to the source it came from. That is a claim about particular fields, not a seal over the whole page. It comes in two amounts of work, which the next section separates rather than averaging. Fully verified is the complete standard above both: the whole fifteen-field record, the thirteen growing facts plus what the plant is called (its common name and its other names), each carried by a named source, with the unsettled points written down. Not one plant holds it yet, and that zero is published at the top of this page rather than rounded up. Two honest footnotes on the standard itself: years to mature size may rest on a recorded convention where no publisher states one (today 10 of the 36 full records carry a quoted source for it); and a plant's own common name counts only when a source actually prints it, which sources often do not.

The fields it covers, and the authorities behind them

The facts a garden plan is built on: how tall and how wide the plant really grows, the hardiness zones it can be expected to survive, how much sun it needs, and the trait tags a recommendation leans on, cut flower, fragrant and pollinator among them. The sources are named botanical authorities: the RHS, Missouri Botanical Garden, POWO at Kew, SANBI and the university extension services, NC State's among them, and for a named cultivar the breeder's own registration, which on a trademarked plant is often the most accurate size anyone publishes. Scientific names get a pass of their own over the whole library, against those same authorities. A smaller set of 36 plants is checked past those fields to everything else the page says, and those are listed by name below.

What it deliberately does not claim

  • Not every fact on the page, on most plants. Bloom months and water needs are checked on the 36 plants that hold the deeper of the two standards below, and on none of the other 492. They are named as gaps rather than quietly counted as checked.
  • Not the exact color, on any plant. Sources give color in words, 'rose-pink', 'creamy white', never as a color code, so the code a page is painted with has nothing to be checked against and never will have. The color WORD can be checked, and on those same 36 plants it has been; on the rest it is a curated choice with nothing behind it.
  • Not the artwork or the photographs. Most plants here have no photograph at all: their card is an illustration we generated with AI, labeled as an illustration wherever it appears, and never counted as checked by anything. Where a plant has real photographs, they were matched to a species by an automated chain and approved automatically once that match and the license both came back clean. Nothing confirms, photo by photo, that a picture shows this exact plant. That is true of every plant here, including the ones checked in full.

The care notes are a separate layer

Soil, toxicity and invasiveness are not fields in this catalog at all, so no check can hold them to a source. What exists instead is written prose: 276 plant pages carry researched notes, on subjects like soil and siting, disease and pests, and on 124 of them a Safety note, every statement credited to the publisher it came from. That layer is curated separately and is not re-read by the pass behind this list, so a checkmark tells you nothing about a plant's notes. Nor is a missing Safety note a clearance: nothing here separates "checked, and it is not toxic" from "nobody has looked yet".

Two levels of checking

Both are real checks against named sources, one plant at a time. They differ in how much of the page they reach. Every plant in this list holds at least the first.

Source-checked

492 plants

The facts a garden plan is built on. These are checked and the rest of the page is not, which is exactly what the gaps below say.

  • Mature height
  • Mature spread
  • Hardiness zones
  • Sun needs
  • The honesty tags

Checked in full

36 plants

Everything on the left, and then everything else the page states, each with the source's own words beside it and a written list of whatever the sources could not settle.

  • Mature height
  • Mature spread
  • Hardiness zones
  • Sun needs
  • The honesty tags
  • Bloom months
  • Bloom color, in words
  • Water needs
  • Years to mature size
  • Soil
  • Diseases
  • Pests
  • Toxicity

The 36 checked in full

Short enough to read, so it is printed rather than hidden behind a filter. Each one is also marked in the full list at the bottom of this page.

What we check

A plant page makes a dozen kinds of claim, and they are not all checkable the same way. This is where each kind stands: checked against outside sources (the RHS, Missouri Botanical Garden, NC State Extension, POWO at Kew, SANBI), not checked yet, not yet a field at all, or not checkable by any source.

Source-checked

On every plant in this list

Checked plant by plant during its own deep run: about eight independent sources, every claim recorded next to the source it came from.

  • Mature height

    How tall it really gets, which is also the size its 3D model is built at.

  • Mature spread

    How wide it grows, which is what spacing on a plan hangs on.

  • Hardiness zones

    Where it can be expected to survive winter.

  • Sun needs

    Full sun through full shade.

  • The honesty tags

    Cut flower, fragrant and pollinator: the three tags that drive recommendations, so they are held to sources.

Checked in full

On 36 of them, a deeper check

Everything above, plus the rest of what the page says about the plant, each with the source's own words beside it. The other 492 are checked on the fields above and not on these.

  • Bloom months

    When it actually starts and stops, read off named sources for a cold-winter garden rather than from a catalog's season word.

  • Bloom color, in words

    What the sources call the color. The color CODE the page is painted with is still nobody's to check, and the row below says so.

  • Water needs

    The one the drought-tolerant tag is derived from, so getting it wrong moves a recommendation.

  • Years to mature size

    The horizon the height and spread are read at. Where no publisher states one, the record says the number is a house convention instead of pretending it is measured.

  • Soil, diseases, pests and toxicity

    Collected against named sources even though the catalog has no field for any of them, so the answer exists before the field does.

  • And what the sources could not settle

    Every one of these plants carries a written list of what stayed unresolved. A check that finds nothing to disagree about has usually not looked hard enough.

Checked library-wide

Names and internal consistency

Separate passes that cover every plant in the library, not just the verified list.

  • Botanical names

    Every built-in plant's scientific name was checked against the botanical registries; 42 were corrected in that pass.

  • Internal consistency

    A standing audit checks that a plant's own values agree with each other. It cannot catch a value that is consistent but wrong, which is exactly the gap the source checks exist to close.

Not checked yet

The honest gaps

Named gaps, never quiet ones. These are checked on the 36 plants above and on no others, so on every other plant in the library they are still unchecked, and both are on the roadmap below.

  • Bloom months

    The biggest one. Bloom time is regional: a UK source's bloom window is not a zone 5 bloom window, so the rule for reading sources has to be designed before collection starts.

  • Water needs

    Next in line after the current pass, partly because the drought-tolerant tag is derived from it.

  • Years to mature size

    Collected word for word from source pages, but deliberately stored as raw material rather than scored or trusted yet.

Not a field yet

Said in prose, not in fields

Soil, toxicity and invasiveness have no structured field in the catalog: there is no per-plant value for a check to hold. We publish them as sourced notes on the plants that carry a curated record, each note credited to its publisher, so "not a field" never means nothing is said. The deeper check above collects soil, diseases, pests and toxicity against named sources for its 36 plants, but there is still no field, so no page renders them as a value yet.

  • Soil

    Type, pH and drainage have no field anywhere in the catalog; soil advice appears only inside some plants' curated notes, its source named. As a field it would be the highest-value addition the catalog could gain, and it comes once the claims already shipping are sound.

  • Toxicity

    The clearest case of the difference: 124 plant pages print a sourced Safety note today, as prose. What no plant has is a yes-or-no toxicity field, so a page without a note is silent, not cleared, and the shipped notes are due an audit before any field is added.

  • Invasiveness

    Discussed in the curated notes on some plants, as a regional question, because it is one: a plant that is invasive in one region can be well behaved in another. A field would need a per-region answer, not a yes or no, so like native ranges it waits on a schema decision first.

No source can say

The unverifiable

Stated plainly rather than hidden.

  • Exact color values

    Sources describe color in words, 'rose-pink', 'creamy white', never as a color code, so the code itself has nothing to be checked against, on any plant, ever. The color WORD can be checked, and on the 36 plants above it has been; you can also simply look at the photo.

  • The 3D models

    No botanical source publishes the shape of a plant. Each model is drawn from a procedural archetype built at the plant's real mature size, and that size is exactly what the height and spread checks discipline.

  • Subjective tags

    'Dramatic' or 'elegant' is a matter of taste, and no source can confirm taste.

The goal is a 100% verified data record: every fact on every plant checked against named sources, with the honest count published, which today is 0 and climbing. Artwork, the 3D models, and matters of taste can never be checked against a source, so they sit outside the number, named here rather than counted.

The rule underneath both halves is unchanged: zero unverifiable claims presented as facts.

The method, on one plant

Here is what the board above means on a real entry: Bee Balm, one of the 528 source-checked plants, with its actual catalog values. The marks show how the method treats each kind of field, not a field-by-field report card for this one plant: the published ledger records which standard checked each plant, not a per-field result for each. This one holds the checked in full standard, so read the marks below as that standard's answers.

An example of the method, not a live readout

Bee Balm in bloom

Bee Balm

Monarda

Also called bergamot and wild bergamot

Our illustrated card, generated with AI. The artwork is ours, labeled as an illustration wherever it appears, and no source can check a drawing.

Mature size Source-checked3 ft tall × 2 ft wide
Hardiness zones Source-checkedZones 3–9
Sun Source-checkedFull sun
Honesty tags Source-checkedCut flower · Fragrant · Pollinator

The three tags that drive recommendations.

Botanical name Checked library-wideMonarda

Checked against the botanical registries in a separate pass over the whole library.

Water Checked in fullModerate

Read off named sources for this plant, with the quote recorded beside it.

Bloom months Checked in full

Read off named sources for a cold-winter garden, with the quote recorded beside it.

Exact color value No source can say#d6402e

Sources say color in words, never as a code, so the color name can be checked; this exact code cannot, on any plant, and the photo shows the rest.

3D model No source can sayDrawn at its real mature size

No source publishes a plant's shape; the size the model is built at is what the height and spread checks discipline.

These are Bee Balm's real values from the published catalog. The statuses describe how each kind of field is handled across the verified list; per-field results for individual plants are not published today.

When a source disagrees with us

This is the part that earns the checkmark. The reading is done by AI research agents, and we say so because the method is the point: one pass collects, an independent second pass re-fetches every cited page and tries to refute the first, every unit conversion is recomputed, and every value carries the page it came from with the source's verbatim words. A source that fails to load, describes a different plant, or does not contain its quoted value is dropped, not discounted. The evidence is frozen, the published record re-derives from it byte for byte, and the pass is a collector, not a decider: machines do the reading, a human decides what gets applied.

  1. The pass proposes

    When a source disagrees with a catalog value, the disagreement is recorded as a proposal, with the source's own words beside it.

  2. A human decides

    A proposal becomes a change only when a person reviews and applies it. Corrections that would ripple into how plants are drawn or spaced, the heights and the spreads, are deliberately held back until that ripple has been reviewed.

  3. The ledger remembers

    Every applied change is recorded in a ledger. And when the evidence is thin, that is recorded too: some checks end in "not enough evidence", which is an outcome of its own, never a prompt to guess.

What's next

In order. This is the plan, not a promise with dates on it.

  1. Common names and synonyms In progress

    Today only 98 of 1,702 plants carry any alternate name, which is why searching a nickname can miss a plant that is in the library. This pass exists to change that.

    ScopeCollection runs in bounded batches of roughly 44 plants per session.

  2. Water needs

    Partly because the drought-tolerant tag is derived from it. Done on 36 plants already, as part of the deeper check above; the rest of the library is the work.

    ScopeA collection pass on the same machinery as the current one; water is categorical like sun, the cleanest-scoring kind of field.

  3. Cleaning up the tag vocabulary

    So that one idea is not spelled four ways.

    ScopeA decision-and-cleanup pass; no new collection required.

  4. Turning "native" into a region

    A plant native to the northeast is not native to California; a bare "native" label has no referent.

    ScopeBlocked on a design decision, a schema and UI question, before any collection can start.

  5. Bloom months

    The biggest gap: a UK source's bloom window is not a zone 5 bloom window. The deeper check has done it for 36 plants, which is what proves the method rather than what finishes the job.

    ScopeThe largest of the five. The regional rule is designed first, then it needs a full collection pass of its own.

Where the authorities disagree

The disagreements this pipeline surfaces are published in full, with the dataset free to download.

Browse every source-checked plant

All 528 source-checked plants, grouped by type, alphabetical within each group. The ones checked in full carry a mark; everything else here holds the core check.

Perennials 159 source-checked

Annuals 75 source-checked

Bulbs 62 source-checked

Shrubs 57 source-checked

Roses 52 source-checked

Climbers 32 source-checked

Conifers 30 source-checked

Grass 21 source-checked

Herbs 19 source-checked

Trees 12 source-checked

Ferns 9 source-checked