About Understory Guide
Plant information is scattered. Hardiness lives on one site, soil on another, companion-planting advice on a dozen contradictory blogs. Understory Guide pulls these open data sources into a single engine so you can answer the only question that matters: what will actually thrive in my yard?
What we do
We combine public, open datasets — USDA plant taxonomy and traits, the 2023 USDA hardiness zone map, and Creative Commons plant photography — into one searchable database. The Plant Finder matches plants to your location and conditions; each plant profile gathers what's known about growing it in one place; the Guild Builder assembles a layered planting around any plant you pick.
What we deliberately don't do is publish companion-planting pairings. That advice is a vegetable-garden tradition, and the dataset our trait coverage rests on doesn't describe vegetables — so almost none of it would apply to the native and wild plants here. We explain that in full on the sources page.
How we handle data honestly
Authoritative facts (taxonomy, native status, distribution, hardiness) come straight from government sources and are labeled USDA. Where a value is worked out from those sources rather than quoted directly, it's labeled Derived and computed by a fixed rule, not guessed. Where nobody authoritative publishes a value, we leave it blank and don't build a filter on it — we'd rather answer fewer questions well than many questions vaguely. See Data & sources for the full methodology.
Who's behind it
Understory Guide is an independent project built by a gardener and data tinkerer who got tired of cross-referencing five tabs to plan one garden bed. It isn't affiliated with the USDA or any nursery. If something looks wrong, please tell us — accuracy is the whole point.