When an AI gardener gives you advice, touch grass

When I started this journey, I couldn’t tell you the difference between a dandelion and a daffodil. So, the first tool I reached for was my Pokédex (or, less romantically, my iPhone's plant identification feature).

On every walk, I'd point the camera at something green, and it would tell me what it was: genus, species, a card of facts, and links to chase.

Like an episode of “Lost,” every answer opened 10 new questions. What's a climate zone? What does perennial mean? How much water is too much — and why does a plant signal "too much water" the same exact way it signals "too light"? Is it weird that nature ships the same error message for opposite problems and leaves you to debug it in the dirt? And speaking of that, which bugs are good for the garden, and which are villains?

There was, and is, so much to learn. But the internet never runs short of volumes on any subject and the Pokédex certainly connects me to that abundance of knowledge.

The Pokédex's flaw: confident but sometimes wrong, and useless at the thing a beginner needs most — telling my tomato seedling from a weed. So I’ve erroneously nursed weeds and yanked flowers. (RIP to the Morning Glory briefly mistaken for a sweet potato.)

The second tool I built myself: an agent I trained on everything I'd learned about my specific garden. I named him Treebeard after the ancient being from “The Lord of the Rings,” hoping he'd speak on behalf of the plants.

Patient and always ready to answer, Treebeard never tired of my questions, and his answers came thoughtful, robust and supremely confident. He earned his keep — especially while we planned care and logistics for Cherry Potter, our new cherry tree.

But Treebeard also once told me to prune my struggling purslane, Sir Scraggles, with the reckless disregard of a serial killer. Full confidence, no caveats. I obliged; Sir Scraggles did not survive. The thing is, Treebeard doesn't own a pair of shears … I do. I learned that I need to verify before any cut I can't undo. 

The third teacher I didn't choose at all. The algorithm noticed, and decided gardening was my entire personality now. My feeds filled with tips like pruning hacks, watering schedules, and “ten plants you can't kill” (I could).

And I learned an enormous amount from videos I never went looking for. Which in time revealed the same flaw as the rest of my tools. Not misinformation, per se, but misapplication.

A creator can simply be wrong; it happens all the time. But, more disorienting, they can be completely right, for someone else. Right for a different set of variables. A different species. A different climate that was never a Missouri July.

Confident answers to a question I, a newbie, didn't ask, about a plant I don't own, in a place I don't live, leading to bad purchases, poor decisions and you guessed it, more plants for the compost pile. 

Stardew Valley has a defined progression logic built in. You plant, you water, and the game tells you immediately (and truthfully) that it worked. A real garden does no such thing. You do the thing: adjust the water, move the pot into the sun, take the cut Treebeard swore by. And then you wait. Days. Weeks. A whole season, sometimes, before the plant tells you whether you were right. And even then you can't be sure which thing you did mattered, because there were forty variables and you changed six of them and the weather did whatever it pleased the entire time.