Why I Made This

A clump of flowers blooming by the road. A weed pushing up through a crack in the pavement. That plant on a friend’s balcony you can’t name. You stop, look for a second, think it’s pretty, and walk on. To you it stays “that thing” — never quite a someone.

I’ve always found that a little sad.

There are nearly 400,000 kinds of plants on Earth. They arrived long before we did, outlived ice ages and floods we never saw, fed every insect and bird that ever passed — and fed us, too. How a leaf catches the light. How many years a seed will wait before it agrees to sprout. How a flower shaped itself, over time, so a certain bee could find it. None of it came from nowhere — behind each plant lies a story, written slowly across millions of years.

It’s just that most of these plants, we can’t even name.

And right now, they’re vanishing faster than we can come to know them. Each one that slips quietly away takes more than a species with it — it takes a story that can never be finished.

So I set out to do something a little foolish: to gather each plant’s story, piece by piece, and tell it back to you.

I build YardMate on my own. With the power of AI, I dig into where a plant came from, how it survives, and what has passed between it and this land — and us. I want the moment you raise your phone to be more than a name: a life with a past, a character, something worth remembering.

Because I believe we protect what we know. Once you can call it by name, you look a little longer. Once you know its story, you can’t bear to lose it.

And I don’t want that to stay just words — so I’ve put it into action.