The Plantalya story
And at some point I'd had enough. Plantalya is the tool I wish I'd had every time a leaf turned yellow and I couldn't tell why.
My name is Allan Pissarello. For years I bought plants with the best intentions and watched them fade. Too much water, not enough light, a repot at the wrong moment, advice read somewhere and applied to the wrong species. Every time the same scene: a plant that looks fine, then suddenly doesn't, and nobody to tell me what happened.
The apps I tried gave me a name, sometimes the right one, and a care sheet identical from one plant to the next. “Water moderately. Indirect light.” That never saved a plant of mine. What I was missing was the why: why this one wants to dry out between waterings, why that one scorches near a window, what the very first sign of root rot looks like.
One day I was done guessing. I started writing down, plant by plant, what the serious sources say: the Royal Horticultural Society, university extension services, Kew Gardens. That notebook became this site, and the app followed so the guides could travel to where they're needed: in front of the plant, phone in hand.
An app to identify a plant from a photo, diagnose what's wrong, schedule watering and feeding, and know at once whether it's dangerous for a cat or a dog. And an encyclopedia of 503 plants, written in ten languages, that you can read here without installing anything.
Every page starts from references you can open yourself: RHS, NC State and Penn State Extension, Plants of the World Online, GBIF, ASPCA. The numbers come from there, never from a guess, and the sources are listed at the bottom of each page. I write and edit the guides following a documented process, I fix the errors readers report, and when I don't know, I say so.
No advice copied from one plant to the next. No invented numbers. No pages published to pad the site. If a topic doesn't concern your plant, it doesn't exist here.
A mistake in a guide, a plant that's missing, a question: the contact page is there for that, and I read everything.
