Why I love the free Picture This app
It identifies your trees, plants, birds, and insects in seconds
A bookish life has its hazards. Stick with it long enough, and you’ll end up knowing all sorts of literary arcana but not the names of the trees in your front yard.
My life is an example.
As a book critic, I’ve learned that William Carlos Williams jotted notes for his poems on prescription pads between house calls. I know that Jacqueline Susann printed out each draft of the Valley of the Dolls on a different color paper. And I’ve found that Ernest Hemingway had a shockingly deficient sex education: Well into his 20s, he believed that young men shouldn’t have sex too often because they had a finite number of orgasms and had to save some for middle age.
What I didn’t know until recently was: What plant had sprouted, steps from my front door, where a yard service had removed an azalea bush with roots that were choking a buried pipe?
Then I remembered the Picture This app I’d seen on a friend’s iPhone. It lets you snap a photo of a tree or flower and see what it is. I downloaded it, took a picture of the plant that was thriving where my azalea bush had stood. Within seconds I’d learned that I was looking at a fledging willow oak tree, also known as a swamp chestnut oak.
After a few more clicks, I knew everything I needed about the newcomer to my yard, and I’d and saved my photo of it to a section of the app called “My Garden.”
All of it was so easy that I began taking pictures of what I saw on my sunset walks on a well-kept trail that runs along the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay. Every day I’d snap a few more trees and flowers.
It turned out that for years, without realizing it, I’d been seeing basket grass, spotted laurel, olive trees, a Heart of Jesus plant, Chinese clematis vines, and more. How could I have failed to recognize those summer grape leaves that covered a small arbor near the willow oak?
A garland of apps for iOS and Android phones do similar detective work. But Picture This has everything I need as a nonspecialist who doesn’t own a gardening tool. It’s free, easy to use, and intuitively organized.
Picture This also lets you identify birds, insects, and potential allergens. My problem now is: How will I keep the roots of that fledgling willow oak from strangling buried cables as did those of my vanished azalea bush?
Hello Jan, I'm here as you suggested and you're my first follow. First thing, download this app, my garden is full of odd plants and I live surrounded by Epping Forest in NE London so great suggestion again. Second, join paid Substack and sort out a rather complicated setup on here.
Thanks, Beth. The Apple app store lists a free option (below). There's also paid version that offers more services. And Plant Finder does try to get you to go for a subscription when you sign up. I ignored that without difficulty (as did a commenter at the app store who bypassed it by clicking "cancel"). But Plant Finder could probably be clearer about this, and for some people, that might be a strike against it.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/picturethis-plant-identifier/id1252497129