Data sources and licensing
Everything on GardenDecoded is either openly licensed and attributed, or written by us. This page records exactly what comes from where.
Botanical names and classification
World Flora Online — the WFO Plant List
Accepted names, authorship, taxonomic rank, family, genus and synonymy. Distributed as a Darwin Core Archive.
- Licence
- CC0 1.0 (public domain dedication)
- Website
- worldfloraonline.org
- Used for
- Every plant record and every synonym on this site.
Common names
GBIF Backbone Taxonomy, drawing on Catalogue of Life
English common names — the ones that let you search for “foxglove” rather than Digitalis purpurea. Where a plant has several, all are searchable and the most widely used is shown as the page heading.
- Licence
- CC BY 4.0
- Coverage
- Around 21,000 of our species have at least one English name. The remainder are mostly species with no common name in any language — they have never needed one.
- Website
- gbif.org · catalogueoflife.org
Horticultural traits
USDA PLANTS Database
Shade tolerance, moisture use, soil texture, pH range, minimum temperature, bloom period, mature height — and toxicity ratings.
- Licence
- United States Government work — public domain
- Coverage
- North American and naturalised species. Many European garden plants appear because they are naturalised in the US; plenty do not appear at all.
- Toxicity
- This is the only source we accept toxicity information from. A toxicity warning is shown only when it carries a citation, and the source is named and linked beside it. We would rather show no warning than an unattributable one.
- Website
- plants.usda.gov
Photographs
GBIF — Global Biodiversity Information Facility
Occurrence records with attached still images, contributed by many institutions and individual naturalists.
- Licences used
- CC0 1.0 and CC BY only
- Licences excluded
- CC BY-NC and all-rights-reserved images are not used. GardenDecoded carries advertising, which makes it a commercial use, so non-commercial licences are off-limits regardless of how convenient the image would be.
- Attribution
- Every photograph shows its photographer, the publishing dataset where known, and a link to the licence — displayed directly beneath the image, as CC BY requires.
- Website
- gbif.org
Are you a photographer whose image appears here? If the credit is wrong, or you would like an image removed, contact us and we will correct or remove it promptly.
Growing guidance
Sunlight, watering, soil, hardiness, flowering period, planting, pruning, propagation, pests and diseases, toxicity and wildlife value are written by GardenDecoded. They are not imported from any dataset, and they are not reproduced from another gardening publication.
This is a deliberate choice. The open botanical datasets are excellent at describing what a plant is, and silent on how to grow it — the gap that horticultural databases fill commercially. Rather than reproduce material we have no licence to, we write our own, which is why guidance appears gradually rather than everywhere at once.
Where a structured trait — sunlight, pH, hardiness — came from USDA PLANTS rather than from us, the plant page says so. Toxicity is never written by us: it appears only with a citation, or not at all.
Other datasets considered
These are credible free alternatives we evaluated. They are not currently used on the site.
- Catalogue of Life — clean global taxonomy, generally CC BY 4.0.
- Plants of the World Online (Kew) — authoritative accepted names and native ranges; Kew's reuse terms need checking before commercial republication.
- USDA PLANTS — strong for North America, limited elsewhere.
- International Plant Names Index — bibliographic verification of published names.