About Easyscape

Easyscape is focused on making gardens easy.  

We provide search tools to help you find the right plants for your garden, to create your plantlist, and to easily turn your plantlist into a garden design.

We believe the plants that are native to your location are usually the easiest.  They usually require little or no additional water, grow more reliably, and are almost always easiest on the planet!  Native plants are critical for supporting native biodiversity - especially native bird life and pollinators.  

To help you find the right natives for your garden, we’ve mapped out the estimated native ranges of over 8000 plants across the entire globe.  Now anyone on earth can type in their address to see a list of their native plants and use our advanced search to select the best ones for their garden.

While we are strong proponents of native plants, we know that most people that grow natives in their gardens plant a mix of true natives, drought tolerant non-natives, and other non-natives that may need additional irrigation to survive.   So in our search tools, we also show you which non-native plants should be able to thrive in your local climate, with and without supplemental irrigation.

Easyscape maps and plantlist searches were built using Worldclim global climate data, USGS SRTM global elevation data, and GBIF plant observation data.  

Maximum temperature, minimum temperature and precipitation information for all global square miles was calculated using 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 ranges for all global square miles were calculated using high resolution data from the USGS Space Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM).

Occurrence data for over 60 million observations of the 8000+ plants in our database was 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

To create all our plantlists, Easyscape first coded all GBIF plant occurrences 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.

We then algorithmically created each plant’s native range to include all square miles that were near a native observation AND were within the high and low temperature ranges, the precipitation range, and the altitude range of known nearby native occurrences.  

To determine climate appropriate and drought tolerant plantlists, we first excluded occurrences at temperature and rainfall extremes for each plant.  We then used the remaining more normal occurrences to estimate each plant’s overall acceptable temperature range. We used the more normal non-cultivated observations to determine each plant’s rainfall requirements.   With this information, we were able to estimate which plants are likely able to grow at any location with and without significant supplementary irrigation.

The “About” section text in most plant pages includes information from Wikipedia. All text in the About section of all Easyscape plant pages, including Easyscape additions, is licensed and reusable under CC-by SA licenses.

All plant photos in all plant pages, including all Easyscape photos, are licensed and reusable under CC by-SA.