Once I started really paying attention to my plants, the things I wanted to remember went far beyond when I’d last watered them.
What I’d changed, and what happened afterwards. Where a cutting came from. Which plant I’d split. What used to share a pot. Whether a struggling plant actually looked better than it had three months earlier.
The more involved I became, the more history there was to lose.
AI became a big part of how I learned, but its advice was only as good as what I told it, and I kept explaining the same plant’s history from scratch. So I tried projects. Then spreadsheets. Then I built my own spreadsheet-based plant system.
It proved that keeping everything together was worth it. It also proved I didn’t want record-keeping to become a second hobby.
The depth should live in the product, not in the effort it takes to use it.
I was taking cuttings, potting pups back in with their mothers, splitting plants and keeping several together in one pot. None of that felt unusual. It was just what my plants needed.
But most ways of recording a collection struggle as soon as one plant becomes three, or three plants share a pot. The old record stops fitting, and the history gets dropped.
Keeping that history, and how every plant connects to the others, is the part of Liana I’ve never been willing to compromise on.
This is the part I understood too late.
Plants change slowly enough that you don’t notice how much has happened until you look back. I now search for early photos of plants in my collection, and they don’t exist. Some went through changes I never recorded, because I didn’t know I’d one day want to see them. That history can’t be recreated.
So in Liana, every photo is part of the plant’s record, dated and kept with everything else that happened.
Part of the pleasure of any collection, whether it’s books, cards or comics, is knowing what you have and something about each piece. Plants keep changing, so their story is never finished.
My favourite part of Liana is seeing that change. A plant’s Journey lays its photos out over time, and changes too slow to notice day to day are suddenly right there. My Swiss cheese plant went from declining to thriving, and I can scroll back through every step of it. I can’t wait to see what happens next.
There’s a quieter part I didn’t expect. With everything kept, my head has room for the plants again. I’m not trying to remember what I did in March. I just get to enjoy them.
Shelley
Maker of Liana · Melbourne