Telling look-alikes apart
The native, and the impostor next to it.
Last updated October 2026
You look a plant up because you're not sure what you're holding, and often the plant on the nursery bench isn't quite the one on the label. A garden center sells the invasive Callery pear beside the native serviceberry. So for many natives we recommend, Indigene names the plants it gets mistaken for, and how to tell them apart standing in front of it: a smell, a thorn, a leaf stalk that bleeds white, not a botanical key you'd need a magnifying lens for.
Not every look-alike is a problem
Each one is labelled:
- Invasive here: one to remove.
- Not from here: harmless, but not the native you wanted.
- Native here too: a wild native, where the mix-up still matters.
When you’re truly unsure, photograph it and post it to iNaturalist, where real people will help name what you’ve found.
Goes well with
Learn more
- Identify a plant from a photo — iNaturalist
- Why invasive plants are a problem — National Invasive Species Information Center
Recent changes
The latest updates to this part of the app, in the same plain notes that go out with each update.
Version 0.38
October 9, 2026- Pages now point to each other where it helps. A region opens its look-alikes and native swaps, a list of invasives ends with what to grow instead, and About links the settings it mentions.
Version 0.32
September 19, 2026- on a laptop these pages use the width they have. The photograph sits beside the text, and each thing being compared reads across one line instead of three.
- "Photos on iNaturalist" opens the plant's own page there, rather than a list of search results to pick from.