How a plant identification app helped me find happiness and satisfaction

Eighteen months ago, I adopted a dog. Now I’m out on the streets of Brooklyn with my hound mix for at least an hour a day, strolling and wrestling discarded chicken bones from her jaws. You notice a lot when you visit the same few blocks over and over: which avenues are the quietest, or when the rusty scaffolding around a nearby building vanishes overnight.

Most of all, I love to admire neighborhood greenery. I’m an adoring fan of the tulips, peonies and dogwood flowers that burst forth in the spring. Yet I quickly realized how limited my plant vocabulary was. Yes, I knew that was a silver birch, because of its papery bark. But what was that taller tree, glossy and looming, or that pale shrub with tiny, ornate leaves? I grew up in Australia, where the vegetation is pretty different from that of the US north-east, and I really hadn’t made an effort to learn about the locals. It felt disrespectful, to say the least.

Related: Butterfly weed or butterfly bush: can you identify these 10 plants?

Googling phrases like “common trees in New York City” and “difference between basswood and linden” (something of a trick question, as it happens), I found what is now one of my favorite things on the internet: the New York City tree map. The map contains information about every tree managed by the NYC parks department (there are 875,428). All you have to do is type in your location, and voilà: now you know that’s a London plane tree, one of the many protecting you from the summer sun.

Still, the map had limitations. For example, it couldn’t tell me what that orange wildflower bursting across my neighbor’s fence was since it wasn’t a tree, obviously, or on public land.

Enter plant identification apps. Friends recommended PictureThis ($39.99 a year), which they found user-friendly and accurate; it also tells you when to water and how to care for plants, a nice bonus for the green-thumbed. But I started with PlantNet, a free tool described on its website as a “citizen science platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to facilitate the identification and inventory of plant species”. It was easy to use: just take a photo of unknown flora and let the technology do its work.

Soon I was pointing and tapping at Japanese pagoda trees, sawtooth oaks and Callery pears. It was helpful in my own home too. That houseplant I’d been calling “big guy” for five years? Turns out, I’m the proud owner of a tree philodendron.

Don’t get me wrong – seeing, touching and smelling a plant are their own rewards. But it was incredibly satisfying to know that young tree with spade-shaped leaves edged in vibrant pink was, poetically, a copper leaf; the marijuana-like stalks edging up between pavement tiles was mugwort, not just “a weed”.

According to Pierre Bonnet, a botanist and project coordinator at PlantNet, the app is available in 40 languages and has 25 million users annually. In addition to casual hobbyists like me, professionals in the education, environmental and agricultural sector use the platform and user-submitted information in their day-to-day work; for instance, Bonnet says more than 700 scientific publications have used PlantNet data.

Bonnet says PlantNet helps to change people’s experience of the natural environment. He introduced me to the concept of plant blindness (which some experts have proposed renaming, due to the term’s ableism). In 1999, the botanists James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler coined the term in an impassioned editorial about people’s inability to appreciate plants and their overall importance “in the biosphere and in human affairs”.

PlantNet might help change people’s insensibility toward plant life, Bonnet hopes. “The fact that they are able to see the diversity, because they are able to name it, it’s not just a green wall – it starts to be something that is much more precise,” he says. “We are quite convinced that people who are aware about their environment will be much more efficient to manage it and to ideally protect it.”

For me, at least, being more curious about plant life is as revelatory and expansive as learning a language. It’s a restful and proactive way to be in the world: when I look closely at a flower’s hidden geometry or brush through overhanging fronds, I feel appreciative and grounded. It makes me think of the artist and writer Jenny Odell talking at a 2017 design conference about sitting in a rose garden and doing nothing: “Although I felt a bit guilty about how incongruous it seemed – beautiful garden versus terrifying world – it really did feel necessary, like a survival tactic.”

I can’t claim to be a fully fledged plant fiend – unlike, say, Judi Dench, who once made a TV special called My Passion for Trees. But there’s so much more I want to know. I’d heard that Brooklyn Botanic Garden offers horticulture classes for anyone who is greenery-curious: should I so choose, I could learn botany, plant care or how to plant a roof garden.

“It’s really nice to be able to start being a little bit more systematic about it and understanding family traits, like plant families,” says Erin Eck, the botanic garden’s director of continuing education. “That is a way that people can deepen their connection to the outdoors and the natural world.”

Even just slowing down and making observations has benefits. “Looking under the leaves and in the crevices of the bark, you will start to notice things,” Eck says. “You’ll start to notice patterns; you’ll start to notice differences.”

I feel warm and happy when I spy a favorite cedar or a glorious wave of magnolias. I didn’t have to do anything to deserve their beauty, and I don’t expect anything from them except their presence. They add familiarity and texture to my day, but they might not look the same in a few hours, or a week – a reminder of the way everything changes.

“We seem to believe that unless we’re riding a rollercoaster or making out with someone on a beach or doing something else that would happen in a toothpaste commercial, then life is lackluster,” writes Swan Huntley in her irreverent “anti-self-help” book, You’re Grounded. “I’m now going to solve all your problems in one statement: if you are paying attention to the details, then nothing will ever be lackluster ever again.”