About Easyscape

Easyscape is focused on making gardens easy - especially by helping you find the right plants for your unique location.  

The site is powered by over 120 million plant observations covering over 13,000 nursery-available plants, and more than 6 billion climate and elevation measurements, covering every square mile of land on Earth.  This massive amount of data allows us to make detailed estimates of plant native ranges and their climate requirements. We compare plant native ranges and climate requirements to your location to help you easily find your native plants, and the plants that should grow well in your unique climate with different amounts of irrigation. See example plantlists for cities around the world.

Native plants are usually the best matches for your unique climate (and the best for supporting biodiversity), but there are many other non-native plants that are also an excellent fit for your location. So we provide easy-to-use tools that let you find both native and non-native plants that should grow well in your garden's climate, that match your specific preferences, are sold in nurseries near you, and even match up with the amount of irrigation you wish to provide them.  For more information see Easyscape Climate Suitability, and Easyscape Irrigation Requirements.

Overall, we take a biomimicry approach to gardening.  We believe that it's best to grow plants in conditions that are similar to those in their natural range. They'll tend to be healthier, more beautiful, easier to grow, and easier on the planet.

Easyscape was developed by the original creators of Calscape (California’s top native plant website) using the following data sources:

Data Sources

• Plant observations were provided by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).  See https://www.gbif.org/, and GBIF.org (17 April 2022) GBIF Occurrence Download https://doi.org/10.15468/dl.f9a7r4, and GBIF.org (20 March 2023) GBIF Occurrence Download https://doi.org/10.15468/dl.z5jcz8.  
• All GBIF plant occurrences were tagged as either native, wild but non-native, or cultivated.  Sources for information regarding general geographic native plant ranges include Wikipedia - https://www.wikipedia.org/, The Biota of North America Program (BONAP)  http://www.bonap.org/, and Kew Gardens Plants of the World Online - https://powo.science.kew.org/.  Suspicious observations were discarded.
• 30 year normal low temperatures (coldest month average low), high temperatures (hottest month average high) and annual precipitation, were provided by Worldclim 1.4. See https://www.worldclim.com/current, and  Hijmans, R.J., S.E. Cameron, J.L. Parra, P.G. Jones and A. Jarvis, 2005. Very High Resolution Interpolated Climate Surfaces for Global Land Areas. International Journal of Climatology 25: 1965-1978.  WorldClim 1.4 (current conditions) by www.worldclim.org; Hijmans et al., 2005. Int. J. of Clim. 25: 1965-1978. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.  
• Elevation values (with approximately 100 measurements per square mile) were provided by the USGS Space Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) using the high resolution data set.
• Climate and elevation estimates for all exact plant observations locations, and for exact user locations, are determined by interpolating from Worldclim climate and Space Shuttle elevation values.
• Irrigation requirements were estimated using Plant Factor Analysis. For plants that are not obligate wetland plants, Plant Factors were estimated by analyzing the effective Plant Factors across the native observations in our database, with adjustments made for wetland classification.   Sources  for wetland categorization include the National Wetlands Plantlist, GBIF plant observation notes, map analysis of individual observation locations, and Wikipedia habitat descriptions.   For plants that are always or nearly always riparian,  Plant Factors were based on sources including the “Water Use Classification of Landscape Species” (WUCOLS) Guide, United Nations FAO, the USDA Forest Service and the US Geological Survey (USGS).  Irrigation requirements by plant for any given user location were estimated by estimating plant water requirements at a given location as Plant Factor x Location Eto. Irrigation requirement was then estimated as Plant Factor x Location Eto - Location Precipitation.  For more information, see Easyscape Irrigation Requirements.
• Nursery Coverage by plant species covers over 15,000 nurseries around the world, most with lists of plants described on the site that match up with the Easyscape database.  If you'd like your nursery added to our site, or to change any information, please let us know.
• Plant Descriptions.  The contents of the “Summary” section in many Easyscape plant pages includes information from Wikipedia. All text in the “Summary” section of all Easyscape plant pages, including Easyscape additions, is licensed and reusable under the listed CC-by SA license, with attribution as specified.
• Plant Photos.  All plant photos in all plant pages, including all Easyscape photos, are licensed and reusable under the listed CC by-SA license.