Building Ask Botanique: A Plant Intelligence Platform for East Africa

When we started Botanique Designers, one problem kept recurring: clients would ask about a plant — what it's called, where it comes from, whether it will survive in their garden — and the answer required searching through field guides, herbarium records, and nursery catalogues. There was no single, accessible reference for East African landscape plants.

Ask Botanique started as a simple spreadsheet. Species name, common names, family, origin, growth habit, water needs, light requirements, altitude range. Over time it grew to include soil preferences, companion planting notes, pest susceptibility, and maintenance requirements. Today it covers 110+ species commonly used in East African landscapes.

The platform serves three purposes in our practice:

Species selection during design. When we're designing a garden in Karen at 1,800m altitude on red volcanic soil, we can filter for species that match those conditions. Instead of relying on memory or habit, the database surfaces options we might not have considered — a Podocarpus falcatus instead of the usual Cupressus lusitanica, for instance.

Client education. When a client asks "what is that tree?", we can pull up the species record immediately — botanical name, common names in English and Swahili, origin, growth characteristics, and care requirements. This builds confidence and helps clients make informed decisions about their gardens.

Botanical labelling projects. Our plant taxonomy service involves identifying and labelling trees at institutions. Ask Botanique provides the verified nomenclature, classification, and descriptive information that goes on each label. It's the backbone of every labelling project we deliver.

The platform is not a generic plant database. It's curated specifically for East African growing conditions — altitude ranges from sea level to 2,500m, rainfall zones from semi-arid to highland wet, soil types from black cotton to sandy coastal. Every species entry reflects real growing experience in this region, not data copied from a temperate-zone reference.

We're continuing to add species and plan to open parts of the database for public access. The goal is to make accurate, locally relevant plant information available to gardeners, landscapers, and institutions across the region.