About House & Hedge

House & Hedge is a field journal for the plants in your house and garden. It keeps a list of what you own, works out when each one wants water, food and a new pot, and explains how it arrived at every figure. It also holds an entry for each plant we have written up: how it likes to live, what usually goes wrong with it, and whether it is safe around a cat or a dog.

There is no account, nothing to install and nothing to pay. Your list is kept in your own browser and never reaches us. Advertising pays for the journal, and the adverts stay out of the tools.

Who keeps it

A small independent team, writing as we. We are gardeners and house plant keepers rather than botanists, which is why nothing in the journal rests on our own authority: every figure that matters is checked against a source, and the entry says which one.

Where the figures come from

Watering intervals, light, temperature ranges and repotting years come from horticultural references and from growers' own guidance, cross checked between at least two sources, and then adjusted to what a plant does in an ordinary heated house rather than in a nursery. Where two good sources disagree, the entry says so.

Pet safety comes from the ASPCA's list of plants toxic and non toxic to cats, dogs and horses, read one species at a time. We write safe only when we have found that exact species on the non toxic side. Where we have not been able to check it, the entry says unknown, and an unknown plant is never offered on a page for people with animals. That is deliberately strict, because the alternative is a guess that an animal pays for.

Sowing and harvest months are researched separately for each hemisphere. They are never a northern figure with six months added, because the seasons are not a mirror: a plant that is sown in spring and again in late summer has two windows in each half of the world, and they do not line up.

How an entry is checked

Every entry carries a date at the foot of its ledger. An entry is marked as checked only after a person has read it against its sources, confirmed the pet safety line against the ASPCA entry for that species, and satisfied the journal's own bar: at least three ailments with a confirmation and a fix for each, at least two questions answered, at least two neighbouring entries, a room it suits, and six hundred words of specific writing. An entry that has not met that bar is not indexed by search engines and says as much on the page.

Telling us we are wrong

Please do. A wrong watering interval wastes somebody's afternoon; a wrong pet safety line could cost an animal. If you find either, or anything else that is off, write tohello@houseandhedge.com with the entry and what you believe the right answer is. If you have a source, send it. We will check it, correct the entry, and move its checked date.

What we will not do

We will not ask who you are, sell anything, run analytics, or put an advert inside a tool. We will not tell you a plant is safe because it probably is, and we will not write an entry by pattern matching one plant onto another that happens to look similar.