alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Indigene – Native plants for where you stand
Back when I lived in Central Florida, it took me years to learn what native plants could benefit wildlife and the local ecosystem as I slowly replaced parts of my yard to make it more resilient to drought. After moving to Seattle a few years ago, I had to start all of that from scratch. LLMs made the process a bit easier but I still had to routinely ask the same kinds of questions over and over, despite being far more familiar with native plants these days and leaning more on native plant societies and botany resources like Doug Tallamy and Joey Santore whose excellent Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't site was recently posted here[1].
A good friend was visiting from Orlando over the summer and told me she was struggling to decide what to plant in her own yard despite her landlord being ok with it. That was enough of an excuse for me to kick off work on Indigene, which is aimed at giving folks just-in-time knowledge about what to plant based on their locale, sun exposure, soil conditions, and their own ecosystem support goals.
Candidly, as many of us have, I've also leaned heavily on LLMs (mostly Claude here) to bring this to life. Largely to avoid saying demonstrably false things, which might be an absurd statement. You can find the GitHub repository[2] a wild array of open data sources I've dug out and cross-referenced to ensure mistakes and hallucinations are unlikely to survive for long. But given today's Indigenous Peoples Day I figured it was past time I shared the projects and invited more scrutiny.
Being the Keep a Changelog guy, you can bet it has extensive release notes[3] generated from the project changelog. Those are also parsed into feature-specific guides so each also lists relevant recent updates.
Lastly, I put together a post[5] that goes into a bit more detail on the story of the project and what I've learned along the way.
I really, really hope people here (and beyond) find it as useful and enlightening as I do.
PS: before it comes up, all the LLM usage for the project is documented[6] and used as warning system in every PR but I think there's a lot more I can do to further reduce it
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49192566
[2]: https://github.com/olivierlacan/indigene
[3]: https://indigene.app/release-notes/
[4]: https://indigene.app/guide/
[5]: https://constantvariable.net/blog/2026/indigene-native-plant...
Comments
Nice idea, but given how limited the coverage is, you could save people a lot of time with a map, rather than everyone having to parse 17 regions to work out if they are in one you cover.
If I may offer a suggestion, it would be great if I could exclude trees from the list of suggested plants - it's much easier for me to print wildflowers and things like that, than an actual tree, where I live.
No zip code input, no zoom out. It's either scroll repeatedly or allow you to get my location so that I can check some location in California. No thanks.
It works well in the sense that it suggested to plant all the wild plants that I see daily in the woods and nature around me.. on the other hand I guess I could have come to that conclusion myself :D .
This is very cool! I got into native plants a few years ago when I moved out to the country. I have been using LLMs to help me with what to plant and where but they aren’t perfect. A couple things that’d be handy / cool to add: - more info on deer hardiness - more info on growth speed (show only fast growers) - would be cool to add a feature for sets of plants too like “good for wild turkeys” or “plant these for all season pollination eg a set of plants that bloom early, middle, late”
Congrats on the launch!
That's pretty nice. I had to use mediterranean France as the closest analogue to North Atlantic Spain/Portugal, but the recommendations look about in line with our native flora.
However, I don't think any of the stated goals lined up with my use case here - in this specific region, we're trying to deal with rapidly warming/drying summers, and I'd be looking for recommendations to help with soil water retention, shade, etc.
The intro video looks very well done. How did you go about making it?
Amazing! Very impressive, I like how the app guided me towards the results page
I couldn't find an option to change the soil type, since it guessed mine very incorrectly.
Very nice! My wife is very much into this, and I'll share it with her.
In restoring old farm ground in Michigan, please send claude robot to kill the autumn olive. I can give it work for years and years.
Other super fun fact, do you know there are standards for needle punctures? hexarmor is expensive but its about the only thing I've found that will stop autumn olive woody thorns. They will punch through canvas and leather. Probably also useful for locusts.
Love it!
Biggest obstacle for me is the giant invasive Ailanthus tree in my back yard. Apparently its roots produce allelopathic chemicals, and I’m finding that some native plants are unaffected (spicebush, wood fern) but others can’t cope at all (asters, cup plant).
I can’t find much if any info on this, so it’s been an ongoing experiment.
That is cooool.
as a native plant nerd and GIS dev i love the idea
however
i think for an experienced developer using claude the app itself would be easy to build
it is the underlying domain knowledge of "what plant actually grows where" is the actual hard part and im not getting the impression that your system is reliable in that area yet
It might handle different locations a bit differently, but whichever option I use (feed insects, easy care, soak up rain, etc) it basically suggests me to just leave the most common weeds grow to end up with a heath covered in brambles/wild roses/various thorny weeds.
Which is logical I guess, if the goal is just to have native plants that grow naturally here. But I suspect few people are looking for this without any consideration to the ornamental and recreational qualities of the plants.