About Sodate

A directory of indoor, outdoor, farming, and exotic plants. Written by content writers and reviewed by category experts, with pricing tracked across five regions.

What we do

We publish individual plant profiles (botanical, common, and local names; light, water, and soil requirements; regional pricing) and ranked "best of" guides built from those profiles, with a published evaluation rubric on every listicle. We're also building the Sodate app, a plant-care tracking app, currently in development.

How this site is made

Every profile and guide is compiled and edited from Sodate's structured plant database, against a fixed care rubric and a published 100-point scoring rubric. Guide rankings are generated by scoring code from that data rather than chosen by hand, which is why each guide shows its score breakdown and tells you how to recompute it.

Sources we work from. Species-level toxicity comes from the ASPCA toxic plant list, botanical names and taxon IDs from GBIF, cultivation guidance cross-checked against the RHS Plant Finder and the Missouri Botanical Garden Plant Finder, hardiness from the USDA zone map, and photographs from iNaturalist under CC licences, credited per image.

What we do not do. We have not grown, timed or measured these plants ourselves, and we say so on every guide. No placement is sponsored, and we take no affiliate revenue or commission on any plant listed. If you find something wrong, tell us and we will correct it and update the page date.

Editorial standards

Every plant profile is written to a fixed care rubric with per-species fact-checking. No individual expert reviewer is named on this site yet, and our review panel page says exactly which sections that affects. When a horticulturist with verifiable credentials reviews this content, they will be named here with those credentials, and the pages they reviewed will say so. See our methodology for the full rubric.