Every change
How your region grew, newest first — 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.
Version 0.40
October 11, 2026- Chicago & the Corn Belt Prairie is on the map: 63 native plants for Chicago, Rockford, Champaign and Springfield, from bur oak to compass plant, rattlesnake master and the wild leek whose Myaamia name the French wrote down as "Chicago".
Version 0.39
October 11, 2026- Pavement pioneers — the natives that grow where the ground is packed hard, rubbly, salted or baking. Eight per region, each with the real place it does that and who documented it, as on the Mid-Atlantic's list.
- Further reading: books, websites and a TV series for each region, chosen because an expert stands behind each one and a local society, garden or extension service recommends it.
- Further reading opens with the ideas Indigene is built on: Tallamy's Nature's Best Hope, Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, and a skeptic's book, so both sides of the native debate are there.
- North & Central Florida grows from 24 plants to 39: persimmon, sweetbay magnolia, sparkleberry, wax myrtle, buttonbush, crossvine and more. Each is one that both Audubon and the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center recommend for Florida gardens.
Version 0.38
October 9, 2026- Every plant on the Kantō Plain now shows a real photograph from iNaturalist instead of the placeholder drawing.
Version 0.37
October 8, 2026- three more native shrubs for the Pacific Northwest — Pacific wax myrtle for a coastal hedge, Oregon boxleaf as a native stand-in for boxwood, and western wahoo for a shady corner.
- fifteen more Pacific Northwest natives, chosen to fill gaps — late flowers like western goldentop and Pacific aster, Pacific yew and wild ginger for dry shade, and stinging nettle for red admirals.
- three more Pacific Northwest willows — Pacific willow for a stream bank, coastal willow for dunes and salt wind, and Sitka willow for wet shade. Willows feed more caterpillars than almost anything else here.
- annuals have their own category, starting with sea blush. Instead of a growth rate, their pages say they last one season and come back from seed.
- the Kantō Plain now shows the Japanese flag beside its name, like every other region.
Version 0.36
October 2, 2026- The Kantō Plain is on the map — 59 native plants for Tokyo, Yokohama, Saitama, Chiba and the country out to Utsunomiya and Chōshi.
- Indigene reaches Asia. Konara oak, the tree the plain's old coppiced woods were built on, feeds 531 kinds of caterpillar here — more than any other plant in the app.
- The St Lawrence Lowlands are on the map — 55 native plants for Montréal, Québec City, Ottawa and the Champlain valley down to Burlington.
- a gardener in Sherbrooke, Granby or Ottawa used to be handed the Mid-Atlantic list, full of redbud and flowering dogwood that don't grow there. They now get the list for the valley they live in.
- each region now shows a small flag beside its name, two where a region crosses a border, like the Pacific Northwest, so you can find your country at a glance.
- every region page now ends with the native plant groups whose ground it is — plant sales, walks and advice from people who garden it. Three to five per region, chosen for the region rather than the country.
- on a wider screen, a region's map sits beside its name and figures instead of alone under them, and the worst invasives sit three abreast.
- a region page's worst invasives are one tap away, from a chip beside the plant categories at the top.
- "keystone plant" is now "essential plant" on labels, tiles and region counts — a plant local wildlife leans on far more than most. Ecologists' word for it is still there, explained, where you tap for more.
Version 0.35
September 24, 2026- Auckland & Northland is on the map — 47 native plants from Cape Reinga to the Coromandel, from pōhutukawa to kawakawa, named the way New Zealanders say them, with real caterpillar counts. Our first region south of the equator.
Version 0.34
September 24, 2026- The Pacific Northwest now reaches into British Columbia — Vancouver, Victoria, the Fraser Valley and Vancouver Island up to Campbell River. The lowland from Tacoma north is one ecoregion, and the plants have never stopped at the border.
Version 0.33
September 24, 2026- every region page now lists its five most-wanted invasive plants, ranked by the local experts' rating, then by how often each has been seen wild. Each has its own page: three ways to recognise it, and real photos.
- Ireland is on the map — 67 native plants for the whole island, north and south, from the oaks of Killarney to the gorse on a headland and the wild thyme in a Burren gryke.
- Mediterranean France has thirteen more natives, chosen for the caterpillars they feed: hawthorn, sheep's sorrel, sheep's fescue, white wormwood, scorpion broom, hazel, almond-leaved pear, heather, hairy broom, bird's-foot trefoil, the evergreen rose, the service tree and red clover.
- eight more Pacific Northwest natives — Sitka spruce, shore pine, wild rhododendron, fringecup, sweet coltsfoot, western skunk cabbage, vanilla leaf and stream violet. Sweet coltsfoot flowers in February, on bare stalks, when a bumblebee queen has almost nothing else to feed on.
Version 0.29
September 18, 2026- the three thinner French lists caught up. Mediterranean, continental and alpine France gained 44 plants — riverside willow and poplar, bramble, raspberry, winter heath, wall ferns.
- every one of those 44 reads in French the day it lands — what the plant is, how to grow it, how to propagate it, and a line for each animal it feeds.
- the central California coast is on the map — 64 native plants for the country from Sonoma and Marin through San Francisco Bay to Big Sur and the Salinas Valley. See the region
- three creatures join the roster — the pipevine swallowtail, whose caterpillars eat one vine and nothing else; the lupine blues, the mission blue among them; and the chestnut-backed chickadee of the fog-belt forests.
- the star that marks a plant an animal can’t live without now says the same word everywhere — “Vital.” It used to read “Essential” on the plant and “Vital” on the animal’s summary.
Version 0.28
August 30, 2026- A share card for every region. Share a link to a region and the preview now shows its own map — with a few cities to place you on it — beside how many native plants, keystones and animals it lists. Browse regions
Version 0.27
August 28, 2026- Six more Northwest natives. The Pacific Northwest roster gains thimbleberry, dwarf Oregon grape, goat's beard, Pacific bleeding heart, meadow checkermallow and tufted hairgrass — filling out its moist-shade, dry-shade and wet-prairie corners. See the region
- Northern Michigan is on the map. Indigene now covers the tip of Michigan's Lower Peninsula around Petoskey and Little Traverse Bay — 46 native plants for its cool, lime-rich northern-hardwood and white-pine country. See the region
- A region's page now names the wildlife too. Under the plants, every region lists the butterflies, moths, bees, birds and mammals they're documented to feed — tap a group for the names, and the number beside each one is how many plants here it can use. Regions
Version 0.25
August 8, 2026- Four regions now name a creature for every plant they ship — Continental France, Mediterranean France, the Alps, and, but for two ferns, the Mid-Atlantic.
- Thirteen more Pacific Northwest natives, including the shrub the list most needed. Redstem ceanothus feeds more caterpillars than almost anything else out there and had been missing entirely. With it: red huckleberry, cascara, western trillium, fireweed, licorice fern and eight more. Seventy-one plants now.
- Something is in flower in October now. The region had exactly one plant open that month. Puget Sound gumweed flowers from July until the rain returns, so the last bees of the year have somewhere to go.
- Region names are shorter, with the qualifier on the line below. "Florida (south & the Keys)" is now South Florida; "Pacific Northwest (west of the Cascades)" is Pacific Northwest. The brackets had been pushing a name onto three lines on a phone.
- On a laptop the region map is a sensible size now. It used to stretch the whole width of the page, which pushed the plant list off the bottom of the screen. On a phone, nothing changes.
- The list of ecoregion names under each map is gone. It read like a geology exam — "Ridge and Valley, Western Allegheny Plateau" — and the link underneath already says whose map the lines come from.
- Each region map is one shape now, and its coastline is smoother. The lines dividing it into a dozen pieces answered no question anyone asks, and the jagged edges were an artefact of keeping the file small.
Version 0.24
August 7, 2026- Southern California is covered — 60 natives for the coast and the foothills. Coast live oak, the sages, toyon, manzanita, matilija poppy, and the wildlife each one feeds. The care notes are written for a dry summer: which plants must never be watered in July. See the list.
- Every region page now has a map of the region. The Pacific Northwest, for one, now shows how far it reaches: the area shaded, the state lines around it, and a caption naming the landmarks at its edges. The maps work offline.
- The Mid-Atlantic now follows real ecoregion edges, not a rectangle drawn on a map — see the shape on its page. A few places just outside it, like the Adirondacks and north-western Ohio, are now told we have no list yet, rather than handed the wrong one.
- Plants that grow in two regions now say the right thing in each. Hornbeam is a garden hedge in the west of France and a great forest tree in the east. The French follows that split, as the English always did.
Version 0.22
August 4, 2026- A lot more to plant in the Pacific Northwest. The list grew from 44 plants to 58, and deliberately not with more trees: sedges and a rush for wet ground, two more ferns, stonecrop and buckwheat for a dry sunny edge, trailing blackberry, Indian plum.
- Early blue violet, and why it matters. Also new to the Northwest, and the only thing a fritillary caterpillar will eat — but it hatches in late summer and doesn't feed until April, so the patch has to still be there next spring.
- Atlantic France doubled, from 23 plants to 46. Heather, broom, bramble, bird's-foot trefoil, red clover, hop, aspen, bilberry, wych elm, wild pear, beech and more. Several flower in August, September and October — which is when the old list ran out of flowers.
Version 0.18
July 31, 2026- Reading about a plant that grows in more than one region? You can switch. Those plants now have a row of buttons under their name — Figures for: Mid-Atlantic · North & Central Florida — so you can see how the same plant behaves somewhere else.
- The little plant drawings are clearer. The green shapes that stand in for a photograph were a mismatched bunch — some solid blobs, some faint outlines, all sizes. They're one family now, each drawn to say what it is at a glance. See them on any region's page.
- *The Figures for buttons line up with the rest of the page.* On a plant that grows in more than one region, the row of region buttons under the name was sitting a little further left than everything around it.
- A plant that grows in two regions was telling some readers the wrong thing. Butterfly weed survives to zone 3 in the Mid-Atlantic but only zone 8 in Florida — and the page showed whichever region came first in our list. It now shows yours. Seventeen plants affected.
Version 0.16
July 30, 2026- A heading that leads somewhere now looks like it. The headings that group a region's plants each end in a small green arrow, with the count beside them as a quiet round badge instead of "(14)". The plain underline used to run under the picture and the bracket.
Version 0.15
July 30, 2026- The menu at the top of every page now says what each page holds. "Explore" is now Regions and "Search" is now Plants. In French the three read Régions, Plantes and Faune.
- When you filter a region's plant list — say you type "oak" on Florida — the part you typed is now underlined in green, exactly as it already was on the plants page.
Version 0.13
July 29, 2026- All of France is covered now, not just the rainy west. Three more lists, each a genuinely different set of plants: the Mediterranean south, the continental east and the Alps. The Pyrenees are deliberately left out — we'd rather say "not yet" than guess.
- A lot more to plant in the Pacific Northwest. The west-of-the-Cascades list grows from 24 plants to 44 — red alder, vine maple, western hemlock, salmonberry, evergreen huckleberry — and, for the first time here, a milkweed, the only thing a monarch caterpillar can eat.
- Indigene now reaches its first place outside the United States: the mild, rainy Atlantic west of France. Stand there and you'll get native French plants — oak and hawthorn, blackthorn and hazel, bluebells and foxgloves — ranked for your spot. (The app itself still speaks English.)
- The app now understands Europe's natural regions, not only North America's. Online, it checks the official European map of biogeographical regions to tell whether a French spot is in the Atlantic zone this first list is for, and says so plainly when it isn't.
Version 0.12
July 28, 2026- Every region's page now opens with the same number tiles a plant's page has: how many natives are on the list, how many caterpillars its best plant feeds, how much wildlife we can name, how many keystone plants. Tap a tile for what it means.
- A filter box on region pages: start typing a name — common or scientific — and the plant list narrows as you type, no more hunting through 40 rows or bouncing out to the search page.
- The category buttons on region pages (Trees, Shrubs, Ferns…) now each carry their little plant silhouette, matching the drawings on the plant rows below.
- Region pages now lead with just the region's name — "Mid-Atlantic / Northeast Piedmont" instead of "Every native we know for Mid-Atlantic / Northeast Piedmont" — and say the rest in one short line underneath.
- The fine print about what "native" means on a region's page is shorter and plainer: native here means native to this region specifically — outside it, treat the picks as untested.
Version 0.10
July 27, 2026- A Browse page of its own: the regions we cover and "start from a plant" now live one tap from the home page — for anyone who'd rather look around without sharing their location.
Version 0.3
July 16, 2026- Full plant lists for each region at shareable addresses, with a switcher to hop between regions.
Version 0.2
July 15, 2026- Three new regional plant lists: the Pacific Northwest west of the Cascades, north & central Florida, and south Florida & the Keys — and the app picks the right list from where you're standing.
- Regions now follow real ecological boundaries (EPA ecoregions), not straight lines on a map — so a spot just east of the Cascade crest no longer gets the west-side list, and Florida splits where the subtropics truly begin. The confirm screen names the actual ecoregion you're standing in.
Version 0.1
July 12, 2026- A starting list of 40 Mid-Atlantic / Northeast Piedmont natives with real size-over-time and ecosystem numbers.