Encyclopedia Botanica

Encyclopedia Botanica

A personal, offline-first houseplant care catalogue. Reference data (family, care requirements, pests, origins) lives in js/plants.js and is the same on every device. Anything you fill in here — acquired dates, locations, notes — is saved only on this device.

Install

On Android Chrome: tap the ⋮ menu → Add to Home screen / Install app. Once installed it works fully offline.

Your data

Care-log notes, photos you set on a plant, and any plants you've added with + Add plant all live only on this device — nothing is ever uploaded anywhere. When you first add a photo, the app also asks the browser to protect this data from automatic cleanup (no prompt to you either way — some browsers grant it silently). Export a backup occasionally, especially before reinstalling or switching phones — photos make the backup file a few MB, which is expected.

Print / PDF

Need paper copies or a PDF of the full catalogue? Use the print view — same data, A4 layout, including your on-device photos and locally-added plants.

Open print view

Adding a plant

Tap + Add plant on the list screen. It walks you through an optional photo, naming the plant, copying a ready-made prompt to paste into any AI assistant, and pasting its reply back in — the app checks the reply over and adds it straight to your catalogue on this device.

A plant added this way is marked Local until you publish it: use Export plants.js below to download a copy of js/plants.js with your local plants folded in, ready to commit to the repo. Once committed, the app quietly stops using its local copy in favour of the real one — nothing is deleted, so it's always safe to try.