Your region
The app covers real places, one at a time.
Last updated October 2026
Plants don’t follow state lines. They follow climate, soil and rainfall. So Indigene is built region by region: a stretch of country where the same plants grow wild, from the Pacific Northwest to the Mediterranean coast of France. Each region has its own plant list and its own map, so you can see whether it includes you.
How you use it
- Open Regions to see the places the app covers so far.
- Pick the one you live in, or the nearest. The map shows its edges.
- Browse its plants, or tap Rank these for my spot to sort them for your garden.
On a region’s page
- Its plants, grouped by kind: trees, shrubs, wildflowers, grasses, vines, groundcovers, ferns. Tap a kind to see only those, or type a name to narrow the list.
- Pavement pioneers: the natives that grow where the ground is packed, salted or baking: a gap in the kerb, a car-park island.
- Its worst invasives, look-alikes and native swaps.
- The wildlife its plants feed, and further reading local experts recommend.
Ecoregions and hardiness zones
Two numbers describe where you are, and you’ll see both as small capsules beside your spot.
- Ecoregion, like EPA 2: an area with the same climate, soils and wild plants. Scientists draw them, and Indigene uses them to pick your plant list. In the US they come from the EPA; across the US–Canada border from the CEC, a three-country commission; in Europe from the European Environment Agency (EEA); south of the equator from RESOLVE, a conservation group.
- Hardiness zone, like USDA 8b: how cold your coldest winter nights get, in steps of 10 °F (about 5.5 °C). Plant tags use it. Indigene works it out for your exact spot from weather records (Open-Meteo), using the USDA’s steps, so no map is needed.
A plant is “hardy” in your zone if it survives that cold. Plants that aren’t are left off your list.
No location needed
You can find plants without sharing where you are: on the first step, choose 🗺️ Pick your region. The list then can’t account for your soil or winter cold, so it leans on what you tell it. Finding your plants explains the trade-off.
Don’t see your region yet? The app grows one at a time, and what’s here is chosen for depth over breadth. A region is added when its plants and their wildlife can be named properly, not just listed.
Goes well with
Learn more
- Find your growing zone from your address — USDA (Plant Hardiness Zone Map)
- What an ecoregion is, and why plants follow them — U.S. EPA
Recent changes
The latest updates to this part of the app, in the same plain notes that go out with each update.
Version 1.1
October 17, 2026- The Scottish Lowlands are on the map: 59 native plants from Glasgow and Edinburgh to Dundee, Ayrshire and the Borders. Each one is checked as native in the region's own countryside, not just somewhere in Britain.
- Scottish plants carry their Gaelic or Scots names where people use them — caorann for rowan, gean for wild cherry, blaeberry for bilberry.
- The Pacific Northwest has 12 more plants for lawns, rain gardens and shade: dune sedge as a lawn that rarely needs mowing, prairie bunchgrasses, lady fern, coastal wood fern, wild strawberry and bunchberry.
- North & Central Florida gets its first ferns, for wet shade where little else grows: cinnamon, southern shield, netted chain and swamp fern. Four grasses and two vines join them, including wiregrass and American wisteria.
- North & Central Florida gets fourteen more natives: the scrub and sandhill oaks, slash pine, sweetgum, elderberry, shiny blueberry, muscadine grape, pickerelweed for pond edges, and frogfruit, a lawn you can walk on that feeds butterflies.
- Further reading for Chicago: John Hilty's Illinois Wildflowers, the site University of Illinois Extension sends gardeners to for photos and range maps of Illinois plants.
- Further reading, What's new, the Guide, Privacy, Sources, About, the Native page and Homegrown National Park each open with a small drawing: a stack of books, a fern unrolling, a signpost, a latched garden gate, and more.
- Calscape now opens the further reading for both California regions, with a line on why: every California native by address, with the nurseries that stock it, and a garden planner.
- your spot's ecoregion and hardiness zone show as small tags. Tapping one opens a guide on what they are and where the numbers come from.
- the shading on the French maps stays in France. Atlantic France's map no longer runs along England's south coast, nor into Belgium or Spain.
- St Lawrence plants are now checked against Kew's world checklist too, as every other region is. Three of its plants Kew records under another name, and their pages say so.
- a spot just outside a US region no longer gets its list when a map service we ask is down — it gets the same answer it would on a good day.
Version 0.41
October 12, 2026- Central Texas is on the map — 67 native plants for Austin, San Antonio and Dallas–Fort Worth, picked for heat, drought, limestone and black clay, and every one marked for whether deer eat it.
- Two books for Central Texas gardeners join further reading, both on the Native Plant Society of Texas's own list: the Wasowskis' Native Texas Plants and George Oxford Miller's Landscaping with Native Plants of Texas.