Terms

What this site is

Gardnicks is a reference database about growing plants. Entries are compiled from horticultural sources, principally university extension publications and botanical garden references, and are checked before they are published. The method page describes exactly where values come from and what happens when two sources disagree.

Using the site means accepting what is on this page. It is short on purpose.

Advice, and its limits

Everything here is general horticultural information. It is not advice about your specific garden, which we have not seen, in a climate we cannot measure, with soil we have not tested. Growing conditions vary enormously over short distances, and a value that is correct for a species in general can still be wrong for the plant in front of you.

Use your own judgement, and where the stakes are high, ask someone local. Your county extension office, a botanical garden, or an experienced nursery in your area will beat any website on questions about your own ground.

Plants, toxicity and safety

This matters enough to say separately. Toxicity information on this site is recorded from published sources and is included to help you make decisions about children, pets and livestock. It is not a medical or veterinary reference, and it cannot be complete: sources disagree, and individual sensitivity varies.

If a person has eaten part of a plant and you are worried, contact Poison Control or emergency services. If an animal has, contact a veterinarian or an animal poison line. Do not spend the time reading a website first, and do not treat the absence of a warning here as evidence a plant is safe.

The same applies to anything applied to a plant. Where a treatment is mentioned, the label on the product you actually own is the legal authority on how it may be used, on what, and around whom. Labels differ by state and change over time, and the label wins over anything written here.

Identification

Nothing on this site identifies a plant for you. Entries describe named species; they are not a key for working out what something is from a photograph. Misidentification is the most common route to a serious mistake with plants, particularly with anything foraged or eaten, and this site should not be the last step before you eat something.

Accuracy and corrections

Entries are checked, and errors still get through. Where a value cannot be sourced, we publish it as not recorded rather than filling the gap with a plausible guess, and the difference between a blank field and an unsourceable one is deliberate.

If you find something wrong, the contact form is the fastest route, and a message naming the entry, the field and a source is acted on quickly. We would rather be corrected than be tidy.

Content on this site

The text, structure and illustrations here are ours, and they took real work. You are welcome to quote a passage with a link back, and to use the site as a source in your own writing. Reproducing entries wholesale, or feeding the database into another product as if it were raw material, is not permitted.

Illustrations are drawn rather than photographed, and they are drawn to show a plant’s habit and form. They are not documentary photographs and must never be presented as evidence of what a specific plant looks like in a specific place, which is why the footer of every page says so.

Links to other sites

Where an entry cites a source, it may link to it. Those sites are not ours, we do not control what they publish, and a link is not an endorsement of everything on the other end of it.

Availability

We try to keep the site up and fast, and we do not promise it will never be down. Nothing here is a service you are paying for, and no guarantee of continuous availability is offered or implied.

Liability

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for loss or damage arising from the use of this site, including plants that die, crops that fail, or money spent on either. This is not a disclaimer of the obligation to be accurate, which we take seriously; it is a statement that the final decision in your garden is yours.

Changes

These terms change when the site does, and the date at the top of the page changes with them. Continuing to use the site after a change means accepting the current version.