Finding your plants

1. Where is the spot?

There are three ways in, and you only need one:

• 📍 Use my location, if you’re standing on the spot. Your phone asks first.
• Search by town: type a town, city or postal code, then drag the pin roughly onto your garden.
• 🗺️ Pick your region: skip the map entirely. The list still works, but without a point on the map Indigene can’t look up your soil, rain or winter cold, so it leans on your answers.

The map moves under a pin that stays in the middle. Press and hold the map to open a magnifier and nudge the pin a few metres at a time. Useful when the front and back of a house get different sun.

Your location goes only to the public map, soil and weather services that look it up, never to us: there is no Indigene server. Your privacy has the full list.

2. How much sun?

Pick the closest of three: sunny most of the day (six hours or more of direct sun), about half the day, or mostly shady. Sun matters most because it decides what can grow at all.

• Tick trees overhead that go bare in winter if that’s your spot: bare branches make spring much sunnier.
• Want a sharper answer? Scan the sky uses your phone’s camera to measure how much the buildings and trees around you block. It’s optional.

3. Soil and climate

Indigene looks up your winter cold, rainfall, slope and soil from public maps. Soil maps are coarse, so it asks you one thing: how wet does the spot stay? Dry, evenly moist, or wet. The map’s guess is already picked; change it if you know better. Not sure? Your hands can tell you in a minute:

1. Wet a small handful of soil until it’s damp, not dripping.
2. Squeeze it into a ball. Won’t hold together and feels gritty? It’s sandy: pick Dry.
3. Press it between thumb and finger into a flat ribbon.
4. A short ribbon that breaks and feels smooth is loam or silt: Evenly moist. A long, sticky ribbon is clay, which often stays Wet.

What you find in your hand beats the map.

4. What is the spot for?

Every list is ranked for a goal: feeding the most wildlife, birds, butterflies, stopping erosion, soaking up rain, or the easiest plants to grow. How the list is ranked explains each one, and how to fine-tune it.

5. Your list

The best 25 matches are shown, best first. Each card says how well the plant suits the spot (Good match, Workable here, or Poor match with the reason why) and how much it does for wildlife.

Plants that can’t survive your winters are left off entirely. Tap any plant for its own page. Tap 💾 Save this spot to keep the list and start a plant log.