Plant finder
Plant finder
Results
How this works
The plant finder filters the plants published on this site by the same facts their pages show, among them indoor light, outdoor light, plant type, hardiness zone range, mature height, water needs, and whether a plant is recorded as toxic to cats or to dogs. Every value it filters on came from a cited source and was checked against that source; nothing here is an editorial impression of how a plant behaves. That has one consequence worth understanding before you use it. A plant is matched by a filter only when a verified value for that fact exists. A plant whose mature height nobody we cite has published is not "short" and not "tall" — it is simply absent from a height filter, rather than being guessed into a band. The same is true of the pet-safety filters, and there the difference matters most: "recorded non-toxic" means at least two independent sources say so, "recorded toxic" means at least one credible source says so, and a plant with no toxicity record at all is neither. A plant missing from the "safe" results has not been judged dangerous. It has not been documented. If you are choosing a plant for a house with a cat, treat an absent record as an open question and read the plant's page, which names every source it has. Everything runs in your browser. The page loads one JSON file of published plants when it opens, and every filter after that is applied to data already on your machine — no request goes back to the server as you narrow the list, and nothing about what you filtered for is recorded anywhere. The filter state is kept in the part of the address after the `#`, which browsers never send to a server. That is deliberate: it means you can copy the address and send someone the same filtered view, and it means the site never creates thousands of near-identical filtered pages for search engines to crawl. The filters are deliberately coarse. Light is the three outdoor categories sources actually use — full sun, part shade, full shade — plus the four indoor levels, rather than a number of hours, because that is the vocabulary the sources are written in. Hardiness is the USDA half-zone range a plant is documented as surviving, so a zone filter shows plants whose published range includes your zone. Height is the mature height range, which for a slow plant may be decades away.
Using the result
Treat the result as a shortlist, not a recommendation. The finder knows what sources have published about a plant; it does not know your soil, your drainage, your summer heat, how much you water, or whether the plant is invasive where you live. Two plants that match the same filters can want completely different care. Open the pages of the plants that survive your filters and read what each one is actually documented to need, along with the sources and the dates those facts were checked. If pet safety is why you are here, read the toxicity section on the plant page rather than trusting the filter alone: the page names which sources recorded the plant, what parts they name, and what signs they describe. For a plant chosen by hardiness, check the frost dates for your ZIP too, since the zone tells you about winter and the frost dates tell you about the length of the season.