Plant identifier. Photo in, name out. In about two seconds.

How to identify a plant yourself

A photo tool is faster, but knowing what it looks at makes you better at feeding it — and lets you sanity-check an answer that seems wrong. Botanists work through the same short list every time.

Start with the leaf

Four leaf features narrow almost any plant to a family. Shape: oval, lance, heart, needle, hand-shaped. Margin: smooth, toothed, lobed, or spiny. Venation: one central vein with branches, several veins fanning from the base, or parallel veins running the length — parallel usually means a monocot, which rules out most trees and shrubs immediately. Arrangement: leaves opposite each other, alternating, or whorled. Opposite leaves alone exclude the large majority of species.

Then the flower, if there is one

Count the petals and look at symmetry. Petals in threes point to monocots such as lilies and irises; fours and fives to dicots. A flower that is symmetrical in only one plane — orchids, peas, mints — is a strong clue in itself. Within the big families, the flower is often the only thing that separates two species with identical foliage.

Then the parts people skip

Bark texture, whether the stem is round or square in cross-section (square usually means a mint), milky sap when a leaf is snapped, smell when a leaf is crushed, and where the plant is growing — bog, dune, shade, cracked pavement. Habitat is doing more work than most beginners realise.

How accurate is photo identification, really

On a clear single-leaf photo of a common garden or houseplant species, expect around 94 percent top-one accuracy. That number drops sharply in three places, and it is worth knowing which:

• Grasses, sedges and rushes — often separable only by seed head structure, sometimes only under a lens. Roughly 70 percent.
• Juvenile plants and seedlings — the diagnostic features have not developed yet.
• Cultivars — a tool can tell you it is a Japanese maple; telling you which of 300 named cultivars is usually beyond a photo.

This is why every result here carries a confidence figure and shows the runner-up species. A 96 percent match and a 61 percent match should not look the same on screen, and here they do not.

Free, and what that actually means

Five identifications a day cost nothing, need no account and no card, and there is no trial that starts charging you on day eight. If you need more, unlimited is $4.99 a month and you can cancel in the app in two taps. We are stating this here because the pattern in this category — a “free” identifier that turns out to be a seven-day trial with an annual charge attached — is the single biggest complaint users have about these tools, and it is worth not repeating.

When a photo is not enough

Do not eat anything on the strength of a photo match. Foraging mistakes happen between species that look alike to a camera and to a beginner — the hemlocks against wild carrot, for instance — and the consequences are severe. The same applies to fungi, which are not plants and are covered by a separate mushroom identifier. For anything you plan to eat, touch with bare hands, or plant where livestock graze, confirm the identification with a local expert, a regional flora, or a botanic garden's plant clinic.

Identifying something else? Try the mushroom identifier, the insect identifier, or the coin identifier.