Credits

The planner stands on the work of others: the references that its plant facts are checked against, the photographers who share their pictures, and the designers whose principles it follows.

Last updated 20 October 2026.

Plant facts

The plant entries were written for this planner. What each plant does in a design, and what it grows well beside, are the planner's own judgement. The facts that can be looked up were checked against these references:

• North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox (NC State Extension): size, hardiness, light, flowering and poison ratings for 978 plants, and where they grow wild, what visits them and what they stand up to for 865.
• ASPCA Animal Poison Control lists of plants toxic and non-toxic to dogs, cats and horses: 345 plants.
• USDA PLANTS Database: native status in the United States, and the states that list a plant as invasive or a noxious weed, for 390 plants.
• VASCAN, the Database of Vascular Plants of Canada: the provinces where 379 plants are native.
• The Invasive Plant Atlas of the United States, for every plant.
• Wikimedia's page-view counts for English Wikipedia, to tell which plants are best known.

Each plant's page names the references behind it. Where they disagree about poison, the more cautious one wins. None of these organisations has reviewed or endorsed this site, and any mistakes are ours.

Photographs

1261 photographs come from Wikimedia Commons, where photographers share them under free licences. Each one is credited where it is shown, with links to the photograph's own page and to its licence. 1018 are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence (CC BY-SA), 141 under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY), and 102 are in the public domain or free of all rights (CC0). We have cropped and resized them to fit the site; the cropped versions are shared under the same licence as the original.

The 132 plants without a photograph are shown in drawings made for this site.

Design

The planner follows the principles of the English border tradition, among them Gertrude Jekyll's colour planning and Beth Chatto's "right plant, right place". The planner's "How it works" page sets out each principle it uses.

Type, hosting and counting

• Headings are set in Bitter, by Huerta Tipográfica, under the SIL Open Font License.
• The site is hosted by Cloudflare, and visits are counted by Plausible Analytics; see privacy.

A photo of yours?

If a credit is wrong, or you would like a photograph of yours taken down, write to [email protected].