Show HN: A free site to explore and discover 6k plants (getanyplant.com)

427 pointsby ryebread7772 years ago132 comments

I’ve loved keeping plants since I was a kid. But the online world of plants can be confusing - strange vocabulary, plants going by conflicting names, and hundreds of niche websites. I wanted to create a site that would organize all of this info and make it easier to explore and discover new plants. That’s why I created GetAnyPlant, which aggregates and matches plants from dozens of online stores. It includes huge amounts of data on these plants along with filters and categories to help you search. You can also save plants to your wishlist and add notes to them.

I’m a data scientist by profession, so probably 80% of the work was totally new to me. I built v1 using wordpress , v2 using django, and v3 I pivoted to using react and next js for frontend.

I would greatly appreciate any feedback on the site as well as any advice on how to grow it.

OwenFM 2 years ago

I couldn't see any way for me to specify my location, to ensure I could actually buy the plants.

Upon clicking one of the plants, I see it was only American sites.

I get that this is just a hobby for the moment, but even if there was just a note somewhere, "USA only", that would have been appreciated.

It still irks me how Americans tend to treat the other 96% of the world as though we don't even exist on the same planet; that we're some sort of exotic tourist destination, or a spawn point for immigrants.

ryebread777 2 years ago

Thanks for the feedback - sharing this project has really opened my eyes to my own bias there. Still thinking through how to best expand the site to other countries but in the meantime I'll make sure to mention that the site is US-centric when I share it going forward.

gerdesj 2 years ago

To be fair to OP, this is a work in progress and it seems reasonable that they have not yet internationalized it. The plants are listed with their binomial names front and centre rather than localized names, but the prices are in $, there is no flag or currency symbol at top right and its a .com domain.

Parochialism isn't the preserve of the US although I still chuckle at being congratulated on my command of English by a shop assistant in Naples (Florida). I just thanked them rather than pointing out that I am ... actually ... English!

readyman 2 years ago

>I still chuckle at being congratulated on my command of English by a shop assistant in Naples (Florida). I just thanked them rather than pointing out that I am ... actually ... English!

Naples in a nutshell. This story made my day.

shermozle 2 years ago

My partner worked in Harrods and had people (mostly Americans) all the time asking the shop staff if they spoke English.

the__alchemist 2 years ago

This is great!

Btw, something I learned recently about house plants: In an analogous way to sneakers, there is a large subculture built around certain varieties of them. They get to be expensive, there is a network of trading, there are ones associated with high status, there are knockoffs (not joking) etc. Very interesting! This site does not appear to be about that subculture.

soared 2 years ago

Great idea to avoid the viral varietals as they tend to be more difficult to keep alive since everyone tries to produce them. Also very nice to shop at local stores to avoid the tik tok midnight variegated monstera nonsense!

(Not sure if always but variegated->less green->less chlorophyll->harder to keep alive)

steve_adams_86 2 years ago

I think your last point is always true, yes. I’ve never seen it not be true across a wide range of plants, whether terrestrial or aquatic.

ChainOfFools 2 years ago

Some of them, like clivia, have a non-trivial lottery component to their hybridization and breeding that makes buying and crossing even a couple of relatively er, garden variety examples a potential ticket to fame, fortune and startdom in the clivia-verse.

steve_adams_86 2 years ago

There are also varieties with temporary genetic expressions (often used as knockoffs), so it’s like buying a white sneaker that gradually turns green, haha. Some of these plants are $100-$500 for a 3” pot with a single leaf of growth.

As the new growth appears, the genetic expression is no longer the desired type. It’s a real racket.

nom 2 years ago

An interesting niche I came across is Carnivorous plants, where the seeds of a successful new cross can fetch 1k USD in auction. For a plant that no one knows how it will look yet.

Like this one https://www.carnivero.com/collections/auction-items/products...

People also hike through the remotest areas to find new wild species. Very cool.

pfdietz 2 years ago

Does it classify by where they are native? Some of us like to plant only plants that are native to where we are living. For others, at least classify by their potential for invasiveness.

Other attributes: toxicity (when eaten or even touched), deer resistance, allelopathic potential, pollinator friendliness.

zamadatix 2 years ago

Another attribute/attribute extension that would be helpful is toxicity for pets in particular.

ryebread777 2 years ago

There is a filter on the plant list for pet-safe! Look for the paw icon. Haven’t pulled this info onto the plant detail page yet though.

zamadatix 2 years ago

I was so focused on the filter drop downs I didn't even think to look for it as a plant category! Thanks

julianeon 2 years ago

I used to be into native plants and that's a big ask.

Assuming a USA buyer, you'd have to ask for their zip code, then match that to the plants, many of which would probably have to be individually coded & entered (the zip codes they are native to), a map blur across the US which would vary for each species.

The binary qualities (toxic/nontoxic) on the other hand seem easy to add.

For invasiveness: that may be a reason why not too many "Amazon for plants" websites exist. But a simple binary "flagged as invasive", like a red dot on its product page, would be a terrific addition.

ethbr1 2 years ago

> But a simple binary "flagged as invasive", like a red dot on its product page, would be a terrific addition.

Agreed!

In terms of difficulty:benefit, a binary invasive flag would get most of the way there. E.g. English Ivy, Bradford Pears, Mexican Petunia, creeping bamboo.

Buuuuut... this looks like it's mostly for house plants, for which invasiveness is less of a concern.

However, I think it should mostly generalize to outdoor plants as well.

At least in the US, you could simply add USDA hardiness zone [0], which roughly indicates the boundaries a cultivar can survive winter (freezing) and summer (heat), and is almost always listed.

I'd be shocked if there wasn't a zipcode-to-USDAH converter out there.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardiness_zone#United_States...

ryebread777 2 years ago

It is more targeted at houseplants now but only because that’s what I know more about. Definitely love these ideas and want to make it better suited for outdoor plants. It could also be a good motivator to encourage people to create an account, so that they can get personalized results based on their location! I think hardiness zone and invasive status are good first steps.

ethbr1 2 years ago

It's an awesome site and kudos on the design!

I like the focus on what your target user actually wants (that isn't addressed by existing solutions).

PeterisP 2 years ago

"Flagged as invasive" where? Every invasive species has a place where they're a perfectly nice local native.

julianeon 2 years ago

I was assuming this is US-oriented, so invasive in the US was my presumption. If the customer base also includes Europe, it could accommodate that also. On the other hand, if you're assuming the userbase is truly global, that would get complicated.

PeterisP 2 years ago

I wonder if there are any invasive species between US states - like, some plant that's native to Florida but invasive in California, or native to California but invasive in Hawaii?

JohnHaugeland 2 years ago

> I would greatly appreciate any feedback on the site as well as any advice on how to grow it.

This is very cool

Things I would want:

1. Appropriate growing zone (ideally USDA hardiness zone low and high limit for Americans; others for other countries)

2. Filter by produces food

3. Needs pollinating partner; if so, what's appropriate (eg if you're looking at a Bing cherry it should tell you required and to get a Stella Ann, a Van, or a Black Tartarian; if you're looking at a Bavay's Green Gage it should tell you not required, but providing will double yield, and to get an Italian Blue Plum.)

4. Producing time-of-year

5. Water requirements (people in Arizona shouldn't grow rice)

6. Importation issues (many of these will be unavailable to a Floridian or a Californian by mail)

7. Sunlight requirements

8. Indoor appropriate

9. Container size if any

10. Soil acidity requirements

11. Filter by live plant vs seed vs whatever

12. Planting time of year

ryebread777 2 years ago

This is an awesome list with many things I’d never thought of! Thanks for taking the time to write it out. Seems like requirements for the gardening user and the houseplant user vary pretty substantially!

ttyprintk 2 years ago

Aquatic might be its own section, really a freshwater fish tank section.

ryebread777 2 years ago

Ah yes, there is already a category for aquatic, but you're right that they should really have their own set of filters and everything else too. (foreground / background plant, needs CO2, water PH, etc.). Im wondering if there is a way to provide a tailored user experience based on what the user is interested in, but I feel that will explode in complexity.

jihadjihad 2 years ago

This is really cool, congrats on shipping. I've had a hard time finding reliable plant information as well, especially since many sites focus only on indoor plants while others focus only on those you grow outside in a garden, etc. It's nice to be able to search for plants I have inside as well as outside.

Having a filter for the genus is a great idea too!

The search feels a little slow, and it's somewhat finicky: if I type in "ficus ginseng" I don't see a result, apparently because the title is "Ficus 'Ginseng'" so the single quotes are needed.

But I can see myself using this site! Nice work!

ryebread777 2 years ago

Ah, yes you are right about that. The search sucks right now. An even bigger issue is that search only matches in the scientific name but most people are entering common names. Yours is the first user feedback to mention it though so thank you for sharing! I will make it a higher priority to fix.

voisin 2 years ago

I’d love if this included outdoor plants, shrubs, trees, and had a filter for hardiness zone.

ryebread777 2 years ago

I’m on it! What sorts of things do you care about when you’re looking for outdoor plants? Anything besides hardiness zone? Maybe categories for trees, shrubs, etc?

01100011 2 years ago

Water usage, edible or not, color changing leaves, shade tolerance, soil compatibility, flowers or not, color of flowers.

Not sure if there's a way to say 'messiness factor'... some trees drop a lot of crap besides leaves.

It would be great to find native plants for your area.

zdrummond 2 years ago

This might be a stretch, but I would love to know what outdoor plants are native to my area.

jefb 2 years ago

This would be an awesome feature. It would be a good resource for plant identification and I won't inadvertently introduce an invasive species into my local environment.

phoxtricks 2 years ago

The number one thing to know for outdoor plants is if they are invasive or not.

(So tired of managing Garlic Mustard, Japanese Knotweed, Bittersweet and Buckthorn)

pwenzel 2 years ago

For outdoor plants, I would really want to know what plants are drought tolerant. Climate change is drastically altering summers in Minnesota (wildfire smoke, drought, high AQI, high temps, extreme downpours).

It would also be really great to search for pollinator friendly plants (https://bluethumb.org is an excellent reference)

lordswork 2 years ago

The regions where the plant is considered native, how aggressive it spreads (there is some metric that captures this IIRC), and regions where it is labeled as invasive. The PictureThis app shows this info, and it's incredibly useful.

ccorcos 2 years ago

I’ve been building a permaculture garden and I want to know

- usda hardiness zone - sun/shade tolerance - geographic origin - is it a nitrogen fixer - soil pH preference - wet/dry soil preference - when does it fruit?

This is a decent resource: https://permacultureplantdata.com/

voisin 2 years ago

Maybe to add on: whether it is pollinator friendly, when it blooms (not sure if this differs from fruiting, but I think so?), whether it is edible, part of a guild (if so, show other guild members)

pwenzel 2 years ago

The first thing I looked for was hardiness zone. I live in Minnesota and our weather is...particular.

berkes 2 years ago

Pl@ntnet does that.

What's even cooler, is that they release all their data as open data¹. So you could create highly specialized listings if you want.

¹ https://www.gbif.org/publisher/da86174a-a605-43a4-a5e8-53d48...

majkinetor 2 years ago

It would be cool to add a sort of public plant wikipedia with info on care about a plant. I love to keep plants, but some are just hard to maintain right.

gerdesj 2 years ago

Great job. What about a dichotomous key (DK) for search as well as filters? Let's say you know quite a few attributes but not the name, you should be able to use a DK to home in on the plant. I note you are a data scientist so you'll know how best to mine the data to make that work. You will need quite a lot more attributes but those might be bought in from elsewhere.

ryebread777 2 years ago

Thank you! Cool idea, I was not familiar with this concept. I will look into what data exists for these.

chris_armstrong 2 years ago

I'd love to do something like this for Australian native plants. It seems like quite a lot of work though!

contingencies 2 years ago

I'm Aussie and a native plant society person. Will come along to your meeting next week and we can chat about it.

danielvaughn 2 years ago

I really love the custom icons, it makes me wish the thumbnails were botanist illustrations.

ryebread777 2 years ago

That would be so cool! I'd love to explore generating images like that with AI.

danielvaughn 2 years ago

I bet LLMs would be pretty good at that since there's likely a large repository of public domain botany drawings from the past few hundred years.

wizzwizz4 2 years ago

I'd consider that deceptive. Botanist drawings are technical, so I tend to treat illustrations in that style as factual in some sense, but AI can ape the style quite nicely while getting all the details wrong. You wouldn't want AI-generated technical documentation, would you? It's the same here.

Can't you just find images, the same as you find plants? Or manually add them, or something. Maybe commission some, if you can't find anything for a certain plant.

fareesh 2 years ago

How does one map 6000 plants to 6000 products across other websites?

Is it done via some loose matching of keywords which is not verified by hand, or is there some kind of global identification system that is used by each of the sites?

Or is it done in collaboration with the sites?

ryebread777 2 years ago

The process is a combination of things. right now most of the work is done by a massive regex. I also do some manual labeling. Exploring some other solutions too. But accurate mappings are a high priority for the site!

piva00 2 years ago

What a great idea! I'm also quite in love with keeping plants and have found similar issues on conflicting names, etc.

Don't have much feedback since I'm not in the USA, eagerly waiting for an international expansion to Europe :)) Good luck!

ryebread777 2 years ago

Sorry! I forgot to include a disclaimer that most of the stores are US based right now. I am excited to expand to different countries but there are a few difficult questions to figure out in terms of user experience. I’m hoping to nail the core functionality and then focus on expanding to other countries. Thanks for the comment!

lovegrenoble 2 years ago

This one is my favorite: https://www.getanyplant.com/plant/2500f2a3a54f3eb7b6163879ec...

jilles 2 years ago

This is incredible! I can remove this app idea of my "app ideas"-list.

stephenitis 2 years ago

A cool feature would to be to show youtube search results and care guides that reference the plant in question.

Every page I open I've been going to youtube to check on videos of the plants

z3t4 2 years ago

How did you find the images? How did you solve the copyright issue?

ryebread777 2 years ago

Right now either they are from Wikipedia, or they are from one of the stores selling plants. I have been reaching out to many stores to request permission to use their images in this way and luckily a few have been kind enough to grant it. Those are the images I use. If you scroll down far enough though you will see there is still a need for many more.

giarc 2 years ago

Could you use AI to generate images for those you don't have a real photo of yet?

ryebread777 2 years ago

I experimented with that few months ago and it was very bad unfortunately. Though it may have improved. Probably for common plants it would work excellent (bell pepper, monstera) but most of the plants on the site are fairly obscure, especially the ones without images. I wouldn’t want to create a misleading image. Another AI approach might be to create simple illustrations of plants I don’t have images for, using other images as reference. I haven’t explored that yet!

berkes 2 years ago

Pl@ntnet has a dataset of 300k images of plants released under Creative Commons https://zenodo.org/records/5645731#.YeGDOdvjKWh

ryebread777 2 years ago

Awesome!! Surprised I didn’t know that as I’ve explored plantnet in the past. I’ll add those in!

Suppafly 2 years ago

How do you decide which plants to list? Is it just the inventory from a few niche sellers? Seems to be missing a lot of really common plants. I couldn't find apple or pear trees for instance.

Honestly just checking it out briefly, it didn't seem super useful. Why is there no way to sort by your plant hardiness zone?

osonfiget 2 years ago

Very nice! Clean design and plants.

Any pointers or guides that can get me started on a similar project? Reading through your responses here, I understand you're using Django and React. While I have some programming knowledge, I haven't worked on web apps.

fjsooner 2 years ago

I think it’s funny, though clearly reasonable, but searching for either “poison ivy” or “poison oak” both return 0 results.

smusamashah 2 years ago

Nice to see it includes Airplants as well.

rlhf 2 years ago

It's really good to get this when you have pets at home. btw, I love the web design.

mft_ 2 years ago

As someone that has struggled trying to find plants to suit a particular garden in the past, I love your site!

(And I just spotted the pet safe tab - even better!)

Edit: could you include temperature suitability? Including plants that can or can't cope with snow, for example?

ryebread777 2 years ago

Good idea!! I’ll admit I came at this having much more experience with Houseplants than gardening, but I definitely want it to serve many communities. Thanks for the suggestion! Is that basically the same thing as “zone?” I think that should be doable - I will look into it! Would love to know any other features that would be valuable from the gardening perspective.

mft_ 2 years ago

Temperature range = hardiness zone, I think?

Also... soil pH, maybe?

mtgentry 2 years ago

Would be cool to sort by ‘community’ too. If you get really deep into native planting, folks recommend you get plants native to your geographic area. California has lots of these communities for example: https://www.laspilitas.com/nature-of-california/communities

mtgentry 2 years ago

Yeah I’d love this too. I live in SoCal and I’m doing my yard with native plants. Some things I’m having trouble finding: 1) plants that bloom in seasons other than spring 2) plants that aren’t native but can work in my climate 3) plants that will do ok in clay soil 4) plants with a small footprint for a small yard. AI has helped a lot but it would still be helpful to have filters like these.

sp332 2 years ago

If you have a USDA zone map, make sure you're using the 2023 version. They hadn't updated the map in... ever, I think?

komali2 2 years ago

This is really cool! I love the clean design.

I'm a little confused though, the prices are showing in USD and not NTD, and for some reason all the stores are in some country called "The United States?" I don't live there.

;)

8mobile 2 years ago

hi, I like the idea but the quality and diversity of the photos is not much. I would also like to know the characteristics of the plant, whether it resists the cold or whether it needs to be watered often.

vidyesh 2 years ago

Congrats on the tech upgrade!

Since this is not an open source project, before I bombard you with technical questions I have to ask, are you open to discuss the structure of your app? Like about your sources, images, etc?

ryebread777 2 years ago

Sure! Happy to answer most things as I’m looking to share but also to get feedback and new ideas on those topics.

vidyesh 2 years ago

Awesome! Feel free some or all.

Few of my queries you mostly answered elsewhere in your replies about images and how you get the data.

How did you determine which plants to list? Is it just a database of all the unique plants from all sources or just a general plant database?

I see each plant shows price + x stores, does that mean you are archiving the prices and not scraping real time? How are you determining the time interval for that?

How are you handling wrongly or typo listed plants from your sources?

Since you mentioned this is using next and django, what are you using shopify for?

Are you an affiliate for most of them or nothing like that so far?

Sorry I don't really have any valuable feedback apart from what everyone mentioned, Search is really slow.

And some or most external links have an extra / in their hyperlink, so at

  https://www.getanyplant.com/plant/4f5952a72087bce5e5c28a72c76c7563 

  https://planetdesert.com//products

Thank you.

pastor_bob 2 years ago

>Since you mentioned this is using next and django, what are you using shopify for?

Looks like they're just pointing to images hosted by others, most of which are Shopify sellers. One weird trick to save on bandwidth costs...but obviously problematic in the long term.

ryebread777 2 years ago

Currently evaluating alternatives for hosting images rn. Open to any suggestions!

ryebread777 2 years ago

I just list all of the plants sold at any of the stores I currently integrate with. I use a scientific taxonomic name database to make sure that the binomial names (genus, species) are legit and not miss-spelled and all of my liastings are anchored to that. I match products to binomial names through a process thats that uses a really complex regex, plus some manual labeling. Experimenting with using more ML here.

Price/availability data is updated on a nightly basis. Probably want to increase that frequency, though no one has complained about stale data yet, so not high priority.

Getting some affiliate relationships set up right now! Already have two added in the past week.

That extra / is mysterious... I will dive into that after work.

vidyesh 2 years ago

Thank you so much! I am not that experienced building large scale projects so really appreciate your replies in thing post.

I am quite surprised that shopify doesn't have hotlink protection for images!

>I match products to binomial names through a process thats that uses a really complex regex, plus some manual labeling. Experimenting with using more ML here.

Thats what I wondering. I am building something similar, region specific for books and sometimes the names are just a little off or partial or alternate names. I am currently doing a string comparison to match at least 80-90% of the words in the title, which works okay for now. So thank you for the ideas.

Your product update frequency is very interesting, I always thought scraping for price aggregation meant one has to make sure its very frequently updated. My approach is a bit different, it only scrapes on search, so not really scraping all the sites. Not the best approach, but its scary to me to scrape complete websites and that much data lol I currently am not using a db either but scraping and caching for 30mins, that specific item which now I think about is a bad idea if I want to make this a scalable project. I should start using a database indeed.

Some feedback on the UI/UX, instead of having 'All plants' selected on the homepage, it would be nice to instead have a smaller grid of plants from each type/tag on the home page itself. Selecting any of the tag would work the same as now but homepage will have more to explore because currently its just overwhelming to do anything on the homepage. I am just looking in specific tags or just searching.

Edit: This is a great resource for adding more info about pet friendly plants to the listed plants. https://www.aspca.org/pet-care/animal-poison-control/toxic-a...

ryebread777 2 years ago

Thanks for the advice! I too am surprised by that. The Django version of my site had something similar! The home page showed plants grouped into categories kind of like Netflix. But when I transitioned to react I limited the scope. But I might go back to that!

One other tip - many sites have APIs that will give you their product data. You may need to contact them about getting access. Or it may be publicly available. But that is better than scraping if it is possible.