Indigene: native plants for where you stand
Today is Indigenous Peoples’ Day, at least in the growing number of places that (rightfully) stopped celebrating Columbus.
I picked today to show what I’ve been building since July, in part because native plants are a living record of the people who were here first. They ate those plants, wove them, and sometimes burned meadows to help them thrive. This is about the app, and why I built it the way I did.
You can try Indigene right now. It’s free, there’s no account, and it works offline once it’s loaded.
What Indigene does
Open Indigene on any browser and stand somewhere you’d like to plant something. It’ll ask for your location; how much sun that spot gets (or measure it); and look up the soil & climate. It’ll then offer you a list of native plants that will likely thrive right there, ranked by how much they benefit the local food web. Each plant comes with an illustration of its size after one, three, five and ten years compared to a person of average height for scale. Because “mature height: 75 ft” doesn’t mean much when you’re holding a seed or a seedling.
Indigene covers 17 regions so far, from the Florida Keys of North America to the Kantō Plain of Japan. Outside those, sun & soil readings still work and the app will say it can’t recommend natives yet. I’d really appreciate contributors to add regions.
Why native plants
Most insects that eat plants can only eat a narrow range of them (Forister and others, 2015). A caterpillar that eats oak spent thousands of generations learning to handle oak’s defenses, so it can’t just switch to a shrub from another continent. And caterpillars are what songbirds feed their babies. A yard full of plants nothing local can eat looks green, but for those birds it might as well be a parking lot.
I try not to oversell the climate angle. Indigene scores a plant’s carbon benefit as small, because it is. A garden won’t offset your flights. What native plants do reliably is feed things, hold soil in place and soak up rain.
Native plants, not nativism
The word “native” is dangerously close to nativism, the idea that people born somewhere matter more than people who came later. Ecology gives that idea nothing, and the last thing I want is for the app to foster xenophobia. The rules are in the repo’s contributor guide and every change gets checked against them.
A plant is native where it evolved alongside the insects, fungi and birds that can use it. That says nothing about people. It doesn’t care about borders either. The Ireland list covers the Republic and Northern Ireland alike, and the St Lawrence Lowlands region runs across Québec, Ontario, New York and Vermont because the lowland does.
What was even trickier was supporting French localization in the app. Simply because I’m French and I wanted to share Indigene with my mom and dad, without whom I may never have had a lifelong relationship with the natural world. The app’s name itself is French: indigène because I can’t help but infuse my work with my own native heritage.
“Indigène” was the legal status of colonized people under the “Code de l’indigénat” until 1946. French botany still uses it as its everyday technical word. The obvious substitute, autochtone, is the respectful word for Indigenous peoples in French, and the far right has lately borrowed it too. Most French gardeners sidestep both and say Végétal local. All of this is on the Native page, with sources, including the scientists who argue the other side.
But let’s be clear, there is no apolitical way to talk about botany. If you’re a technologist trying not to get involved in all that, you have a lot to learn.
Colonialism, concretely
The Garry oak meadows of the Pacific Northwest stayed open for centuries because Coast Salish people burned them. When the burning stopped, firs closed in. A lot of what settlers called wilderness was a garden whose gardeners had been killed or pushed off their land, and genocide is the honest word for how that happened.
An app can’t undo any of that and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. In Auckland, the everyday plant names in Indigene are the Māori ones, because that’s what people there call them. A few plant pages say who tended the plant. Doing that properly for every plant is the next part of the work.
Yes, I built it with an LLM
I’d rather tell you myself than have it be the first comment. Indigene was written with Claude, Anthropic’s model. Specifically Opus starting from version 4.8 which has hallucinated less in my experience than other models. I publish what that cost at indigene.app/llm, and every pull request reports its own share. As of 12 October it was at least $5,151 at API list prices over 139 working sessions, with the electricity and carbon estimated next to it.
While I often laboriously double check and cross-reference all the research output I gather from a now enormous list of authoritative sources, I will never pretend any of what Indigene presents can be trusted without human validation. For example, Opus originally drew the Mid-Atlantic region as a box that reached into Canada and told Ottawa to plant Philadelphia’s redbuds & dogwoods. Since it’s a region I’m less familiar with than the first I added to Indigene, a cross-reference check spotted the error. These kinds of mistakes could happen before, but without vigilance they can happen on an industrial scale.
I also can’t make the LLM resource usage cost number smaller after the fact. What I can do is ensure users of Indigene don’t unwittingly add to this resource by using the app. There’s no LLM behind any answer you receive from the website. Everything is looked up in static lists and your browser does the math. To further limit costs and complexity, there’s no server either. A first visit downloads about half a megabyte and can work offline afterwards (which makes sense if you’re outside in the dirt).
Plain scripts check GBIF, VASCAN, the EPA and the national floras on a schedule to see whether each plant fact still holds. And it’s MIT-licensed, so a land trust or a town council can run their own copy without paying that bill again.
What’s next
Only a handful of plant pages currently mention the people who ate, wove or tended to them in each region. I’ve started digging up sources for every North American region, and it’s humbling. USDA plant guides cover about a third of our plants. Many older sources say “Native Americans” without naming a single nation, a lot of them are mostly about medicine (which may lead to folks digging plants up), and some peoples have almost nothing published by them or about them.
If you’re in a native plant society and this project strikes a chord, you can look at your region’s list and point out any factual errors. If your nation has a plant guide, a language resource or a person I should credit, I’d like to hear from you, on your terms: write to hi@constantvariable.net or open an issue on GitHub.
And if you just have a yard, a vacant lot you keep walking past, or a tiny balcony planter box, see what native plants would grow there.