Version 0.18

Room to read, and the look-alikes named

July 31, 2026

A new section of the app for the plants that get mistaken for natives. Look-alikes puts each impostor beside the native it's sold as, with the differences you can check standing in front of them: a smell, a thorn, a hollow twig. Start with the Callery pear.
Every plant page says what it gets confused with, in one line. Under "Why it belongs here" you'll find Don't confuse it with and the names, each linking to the full comparison.
The label says which kind of impostor it is. Some spread into wild places and cost us something; some are ordinary garden plants from elsewhere that do no harm. So each is marked Invasive here, Not from here or Native here too — for the region you're looking at.
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.
A plant's page fits a computer screen now. A plant on a laptop used to be a narrow strip down the middle, five screens tall. Its sections now run in two columns, so it's half as tall and "check your spot" comes early. A phone is unchanged.
An animal's page got the same treatment. On an animal, the plants that keep it going are laid out several across instead of one long stack. It's about a third shorter on a laptop.
The "ZIP or town" box is the size of a ZIP or a town again. It used to stretch to fill the line, which on a wide screen meant a box half a window wide waiting for five characters. Unchanged on a phone.
*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.
Where to look a plant up has moved to the very bottom of its page. The list of botanical databases is where you go once this page has run out of answers, so it now comes after Want to plant it? Check your spot rather than before 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.