Data sources

Where the plant names, descriptions, and photos in Twigged come from, and how we credit them.

Twigged combines open and reference datasets with hand-curated and model-assisted botanical summaries. Plant fields retain source provenance where it is available. Third-party photographs carry the photographer credit and licence supplied by their source, while original illustrations are identified separately. Below are the main projects and methods used to build the catalogue.

World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP)

Scientific names, family and genus classification, lifeform, and native-range information come from the World Checklist of Vascular Plants maintained by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Licence and attribution details belong to the individual source dataset and release. Kew's citation guidance explains how to credit the downloaded WCVP version; source credits on POWO plant records identify the licence for each contributing dataset.

Credit: “The World Checklist of Vascular Plants”, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

USDA PLANTS Database

Growth habit, native status for North America, and taxonomy for US species come from the USDA PLANTS Database, maintained by the United States Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service. As a US federal government work, the data is in the public domain. USDA PLANTS is also one of the reviewed references described below.

Credit: USDA, NRCS. The PLANTS Database (plants.usda.gov). National Plant Data Team, Greensboro, NC, USA.

GBIF Backbone Taxonomy

Where Twigged confirms that a plant name is an accepted species name, it checks the name against the GBIF Backbone Taxonomy, published by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (CC BY 4.0). Only an exact match to an accepted name is used, and only to confirm identity, never for growing information.

Credit: GBIF Secretariat, GBIF Backbone Taxonomy, doi:10.15468/39omei, CC BY 4.0.

BSBI Plant Atlas 2020

Where a British or Irish wild species shows flowering months credited to the BSBI, the months come from the phenology data published with the BSBI Plant Atlas 2020 by the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland and the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (CC BY 4.0). We match plants by exact scientific name, use only the months the dataset records, and reformat them as a month list. We do not apply them to garden cultivars.

Credit: Stroh, Walker, Humphrey, Pescott & Burkmar (eds) 2024, BSBI Plant Atlas 2020 phenology data, BSBI/UKCEH, doi:10.5281/zenodo.11092846, CC BY 4.0; months reformatted.

Wikidata and Wikipedia

Common names and some descriptions for well-known species are drawn from Wikidata (CC0) and the English Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0). Where a description originates on Wikipedia, the plant page links back to the article for full attribution and edit history.

Reviewed references

Some planning facts carry a “reviewed” label. Each one was checked for a single plant by a named Twigged reviewer against one page from a listed public reference, and we keep that page's address and the date it was checked. The listed references are USDA PLANTS, the NC State Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox, the Missouri Botanical Garden Plant Finder, University of Minnesota Extension and the Chicago Botanic Garden plant evaluations for mature size, sun, soil, flower colour and flowering months. For a named garden variety, its own breeder or introducer may be the reference for size, flower colour and flowering months. A serious poisoning hazard may be recorded from NC State Extension or University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources publications, and a second reviewer checks every hazard. We record the fact and where it was stated, never the reference's wording or images, and a reviewed reference is never used to call a plant safe. Where a reviewed reference is one we credit publicly, a plant's sources list names it behind each reviewed fact. Listing a reference does not imply that its publisher endorses Twigged.

Horticultural profiles

Sunlight, watering, mature size, flowering period, and care guidance are assembled from cited open sources, hand-curated records, and reviewed model-assisted synthesis based on a plant's botanical identity and independently held reference fields. Model-assisted content is labelled in the field provenance and is guidance rather than a source authority. When independently supported safety or hardiness evidence is unavailable, Twigged leaves those fields unconfirmed instead of inferring them from generated prose.

Plant photographs

Twigged uses a licence-aware resolver to find exact-taxon photographs from iNaturalist, Wikimedia Commons, and GBIF occurrence media. We only accept photos on licences we can use in a commercial product — Creative Commons CC0, CC BY, CC BY-SA, and public domain. When no suitable exact image exists, the catalogue may use a clearly identified representative image of a related plant or an original AI-generated botanical illustration. Third-party photos are stored with their photographer name and licence, and those details appear under the photo on the plant detail page.

If you are a photographer whose photo appears in Twigged and you believe the attribution or licence is wrong, please email hello@twigged.design and we will correct or remove it.

AI-generated content

AI design suggestions, model-assisted catalogue summaries, and visualiser images are generated by models from OpenAI and Anthropic, and, where those optional routes are configured, by Google for image fallback or fal.ai for the depth-conditioned structure stage. These outputs do not have a single human source; their accuracy should always be checked before being used with a client. See our Terms for details.