About Plantroster

Plantroster is a record of your plants — which ones you have, where each one actually sits, and what has happened to it — read against your local forecast every morning. It is not a plant identifier with a care tip attached.

Why it works this way

Identifying a plant from a photograph is a solved problem, and several apps do it well. What none of them do is remember that your fiddle leaf fig lives in the hot corner by the west window, that it dropped four leaves the last time the temperature hit 100°F, and that Thursday is forecast at 103°F. That gap — between knowing what a plant is and knowing what is about to happen to yours — is the whole reason this exists.

Two decisions follow from it, and both are unusual enough to be worth stating plainly.

A location is a real thing here, not a label. Plants are filed under spots — "hot stucco corner", "shaded patio" — rather than rooms, because problems cluster by place. The same overheated corner produced two separate spider mite infestations in different plants. Every weather rule reasons over spots first and plants second.

A diagnosis is an event, not a status. Nothing overwrites anything. When a plant that was "sun-scorched" turns out to be sun-scorched and mite-infested three days later, that is a new entry pointing at the old one, and both stay. A care history you can only read forwards is not a history.

Where the data comes from

• Pet and child toxicity — ASPCA Animal Poison Control. 26 of the 34 species here were read directly from their ASPCA entry; the toxic agent and clinical signs are quoted from it rather than paraphrased. The remaining 8 are not listed under a name we could resolve, and every one of them says so on its own page.
• Weather — Open-Meteo, for both the seven-day forecast and the ten years of recorded low temperatures behind your USDA zone and frost dates. Postcodes become coordinates through Zippopotam.
• Species care data — 34 species, compiled by hand: light, watering interval, soil recipe, humidity floor, temperature and frost thresholds, fluoride and salt sensitivity, feeding and repotting cadence, and the pests each one is actually prone to.
• Photograph reading — one call to Anthropic's Claude per photo, given the species list and the symptom differentials as grounding, and permitted to be uncertain. Optionally a second opinion from PlantNet.

What it will not do

It never tells you to water a plant. It cannot see your soil, and telling people to water on a schedule is how collections drown. The reminder says check the top inch, tells you what dry should feel like for that species, and offers to postpone itself if the pot is still damp.

It does not guess at toxicity. An unconfirmed record is shown as unconfirmed. It is never shown as safe — an unverified "toxic" is a survivable mistake and an unverified "non-toxic" is not, and that asymmetry decides every close call here.

It does not name pesticide products or concentrations. Treatment class and "follow the label", because label rates differ by product and country and getting that wrong damages the plant or the person applying it.

It does not pretend to be a vet or a horticulturist. Anything urgent — an animal that has eaten something, a plant collapsing overnight — needs a professional, and every page that could be read in that moment says so with a phone number attached.

Enforced in code, not just intended

A promise nobody checks is decoration. These four are structural, and the file is named so you can go and read them:

• An unconfirmed toxicity record cannot render as safe, and cannot appear in a "pet-safe alternatives" list — that list filters on the verified flag (src/toxicpages.js).
• Every outbound affiliate link is emitted with rel="sponsored nofollow noopener", and the site owner's own clicks are never tagged, because self-referral is against Amazon's terms (src/tools.js).
• A species-and-symptom page is only generated where that combination is something people actually search for. Of 374 possible combinations, 33 exist; the rest redirect to the species page rather than becoming near-duplicates nobody searched for (src/symptoms.js).
• A request for an illustration of a species or problem that does not exist returns a genuine 404 rather than a generic drawing, because a soft 404 is worse than a real one (src/icons.js).

Things not on that list are editorial commitments — held to, but held by people rather than by a check.

Honest limits

• The species list is 34 plants deep, not the whole of horticulture. An unlisted plant can be mapped to its nearest listed relative, which is better than nothing and clearly worse than a real entry.
• Alerts and reminders are computed once a day, not continuously.
• Frost dates are derived from a decade of recorded lows at your coordinates. In mild climates where frost only arrives in late winter, there is no autumn date to give, and the page says that rather than inventing one.
• A photograph is a photograph. It cannot show root rot, and this site says so instead of guessing at what is under the soil.

Corrections are welcome and acted on — particularly on toxicity, where being wrong is the thing that matters. Get in touch.

Last updated August 2026. About · Editorial policy · Privacy · Terms · Contact