About
Gardnicks answers the same questions about every plant, in the same order, from the same kinds of sources. That constraint is the entire product.
Last updated August 2026
across thirteen sections
on every entry
other garden sites
or affiliate links
The problem this exists to solve
Look up the same plant on five gardening sites and you will get five different numbers, none of them sourced.
Hardiness ranges drift by two zones. Watering advice contradicts itself between paragraphs. Mature size is given as a single figure where the honest answer is a range that depends on soil. Nothing tells you which of those numbers somebody checked and which were copied from a competitor who copied them from somebody else.
That copying is the actual mechanism. One site publishes an approximation, three sites paraphrase it, and within a year the approximation is the consensus because every result agrees with every other result. Agreement is not verification, and search engines cannot tell the difference.
The uncomfortable part is that a wrong number and a right number look identical on a page. The only thing that separates them is whether anybody can say where it came from.
What Gardnicks does instead
Three rules, and every other decision on this site follows from them.
The method page goes through all of this in detail, including exactly which publications count as sources and what happens when two of them disagree.
What this site is not
Being specific about what we refuse is more useful than a mission statement.
- No shop and no affiliate linksNothing on this site earns a commission when you buy a plant, a tool or a bag of compost. Where an entry says a variety is worth growing, that judgement is not attached to anyone’s inventory.
- No sponsored entriesNo plant, product or nursery can pay to appear, to rank higher in a list, or to have an unflattering line removed.
- No seasonal fillerNo ten best trowels, no what your zodiac sign says about houseplants, no article republished each spring with a new date. The database grows by adding entries, not by recycling.
- No generated care valuesCare data is transcribed from sources by a person. A language model is capable of producing a plausible hardiness range for a plant it has never encountered, which is precisely the failure this site exists to avoid.
- Display advertising, disclosedThe site is funded by advertising. Advertisers have no input into entries, no advance sight of them, and no way to know which entry an ad will appear beside.
Who writes it
Entries are compiled and checked by the Gardnicks editorial desk. Every page shows the date it was last reviewed, and the method it was reviewed against.
We would rather tell you how an entry was produced than who produced it, because on reference material the process is the credential. A named byline tells you nothing about whether the hardiness range was checked. The dated method statement does.
Whether entries carry a named byline or a house byline is not settled yet. If they carry a name, it will be a real person with real horticultural experience, disclosed as such. What will not happen is an invented gardener with a fictional biography attached to a stock photograph.
About the illustrations
The plant illustrations on this site are illustrations. They are labeled as such on every page that carries them, and they are never presented as photographs of a specific plant, variety, garden or season.
This matters more than it sounds. A photograph implies somebody stood in front of that plant on a particular day. An illustration makes no such claim, and pretending otherwise would undermine the one thing the site is selling, which is that you can tell what has been verified and what has not.
Corrections
If a value on this site is wrong, we want to know, and a correction that arrives with a source gets made quickly. Corrections are not buried: when a value changes, the entry’s review date changes with it.
The fastest route is the contact form with the correction option selected. Include the entry, the value you think is wrong, and where the right value comes from.
Using this material
Quote a line, cite the entry, link back. That is fine and always will be. Reproducing whole entries is not, and neither is feeding the database into a scraper to rebuild it somewhere else with the sourcing stripped out, which is the exact behavior that created the problem at the top of this page.