About Native Plants
Native Plants is a small SwiftUI iOS app I made for browsing Oregon native plants while planning changes to my backyard. It started with the Metro booklet, Native plants for Willamette Valley yards, which I kept outside while figuring out what to plant.
That worked until the booklet got torn up and covered in dirt. I was already using it constantly, so I turned the catalog into a little tool I could keep on my phone and iPad.
This is not meant to be a serious product launch. It is a fun personal project and an excuse to experiment with iOS 27-era APIs in a real app-shaped thing.
What It Does
- Browse a catalog of Oregon native plants grouped by section.
- Search and filter by plant name, bloom notes, traits, care details, section, ease, and bloom season.
- Switch layouts between grid and list browsing on iPhone and iPad.
- Favorite plants and reorder the favorites that stay pinned at the top.
- Ask a plant planner for catalog-backed suggestions for a specific yard space.
- Attach a yard photo or sketch to a planner question.
- Track watering schedules with recurring dates, notes, and mark-watered actions.
The iOS API Playground
The app was mostly an excuse to try system integrations that are interesting to me this year:
- Foundation Models and Apple Intelligence for the Plant Planner when available, with a deterministic catalog matcher as the fallback.
- Structured AI output so generated plans stay tied to known catalog plant IDs instead of free-floating suggestions.
- PhotosUI for adding a yard photo to a planning turn.
- App Intents and Shortcuts for scheduling watering, opening the watering calendar, opening watering for a plant, and marking plants watered from Siri or Shortcuts.
- Core Spotlight indexing so plants and watering schedules can be discovered through system search.
- NSUserActivity app entity linking on plant detail pages.
- SwiftUI reorderable favorites using the newer reorderable collection APIs.
- NavigationSplitView and adaptive SwiftUI presentation so the catalog and planner can sit side by side on iPad.
The source is on GitHub: ryleyherrington/native-plants.
Why I Built It
I kept flipping through the PDF while standing in the yard, checking what might work in a shady corner, a dry strip, or a bed that needed more wildlife-friendly plants. A paper booklet is great at the kitchen table and less great when it lives outside for weeks.
So this became a practical toy: searchable reference, quick filters, photos, notes, planner prompts, and watering reminders. It let me learn the APIs while making something I would actually use.
Screenshots
