Native Garden

Native Garden is a tool for planning what to plant when you’re replacing lawn with dense native plantings. The catalog is a curated set of ~50 species chosen for one specific site - USDA zone 5a, sandy and dry soil in the northeastern US - so every plant on screen is already a plausible fit. It’s less a plant encyclopedia and more “a spreadsheet you’d actually enjoy using,” with the visual front-end doing the work a spreadsheet can’t.

How it works

• Photo-first browse. A firehose of every plant with a big hero image, plus a 2D shape glyph that draws each plant’s height, spread, and growth habit against a human figure for scale - so you can eyeball an ankle-high mat vs. a shoulder-high grass at a glance.
• Filter on what matters. Bloom month and color, sun and moisture tolerance, deer and pollinator value, lifecycle, site fit, or “no aggressive spreaders.”
• Collections. Pinterest-style boards a plant can belong to many of, each with a bloom-coverage chart across the season so gaps in a “blooms all summer” planting are obvious.
• Compare. Put a handful of candidates side by side with the trait meters aligned so differences read instantly.

Notes

One Go binary serves the built React SPA and a small JSON API. The ~50-record catalog is generated, disposable data read at startup; app state - collections, hidden flags, and light-edit overlays - lives in SQLite keyed by a stable plant id, so regenerating the catalog never wipes what you’ve curated. Filtering, compare, and the bloom timeline are all client-side.