Editorial policy

This site makes factual claims about plants that people act on — including claims about what is poisonous to a cat. Here is the standard those claims are held to.

Horticultural data is never invented

Every watering interval, temperature threshold, humidity floor and soil recipe is a real figure from horticultural sources, not a plausible-sounding number. Where no authoritative figure exists, the page says the figure is unknown. A confident guess reads exactly like a fact and is the failure mode most worth avoiding.

Toxicity carries its provenance

26 of 34 species records were read directly from the matching ASPCA Animal Poison Control entry, with the toxic principle and clinical signs quoted rather than reworded. The other 8 could not be matched to an entry, and each says so in the body of its own page and again in a footnote on the summary table.

Matching is done on the botanical name, never the common one. Common names collide in ways that would produce genuinely dangerous errors: the entry titled "Bird of Paradise" is Caesalpinia gilliesii, a considerably more toxic shrub than the Strelitzia most people mean, and "Indian Rubber Plant" is Ficus benjamina rather than the Ficus elastica sold as a rubber plant. Both traps are recorded in the source so that a future pass does not "resolve" them by name and record the wrong plant.

Where the entry covers a different species in the same genus, the record says which species was actually read.

Caution has a direction

When sources disagree or a record is unconfirmed, the more cautious reading is shown. A lower confidence source is never allowed to make a plant look safer than a higher confidence one. This is the single rule that decides the most cases here.

Uncertainty is displayed, not hidden

An identification from a photograph is a proposal. It never overwrites the species on your plant — you confirm it, because silent overwriting is how one wrong identification becomes permanent. Low-confidence identifications are labelled as such wherever the plant appears, and a reading of a photograph is expected to say what further photograph would settle the question.

Medical and veterinary boundaries

This is general information. It is not veterinary or medical advice, it does not diagnose, and it says so on every page where the distinction matters. Pages about poisoning lead with the poison control number rather than burying it beneath an explanation, because someone reading that page at midnight needs the number and not the chemistry.

Corrections

Errors are fixed in the source data rather than patched on one page, so a correction propagates everywhere that fact appears. Toxicity corrections take priority over everything else. Report one.

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