Original, countable research about houseplants and plant AI — computed from this site's own 282-species care database or cited to primary sources. Every study publishes its method, its numbers and its limitations.
How Often to Water Houseplants
Median interval is 10.5 days across 282 species — but ferns sit at ~1.5 and cacti at ~24.5. Full distribution and raw dataset.
Read the data →Plant Disease Detection Accuracy
Why a 99.35% lab score becomes 31.4% in the field, and the five-step checklist for taking clearer comparison photos.
Read the teardown →What is published here
- Data teardowns computed from the encyclopedia database: watering intervals, toxicity coverage, problem frequency, light and humidity ranges.
- Method teardowns of plant AI, with numbers cited to their primary sources rather than restated from marketing pages.
- Open data — houseplant-care-stats.json, the aggregated statistics behind the studies.
How these studies are made
Every figure is either parsed from a file in this repository by a script you can read (dev/scripts/gen-research-2026.py) or attributed to a named external source. Where the underlying data has gaps — for example, 160 of 282 species have no pet-toxicity record — the study says so instead of filling the hole.
Related work on this site
- The Leaf and the Machine — the companion documentary on plant-disease AI and dataset shift.
- The plant encyclopedia — 282 species with the full care data these studies aggregate.
- Free care calculators — the interactive tools that apply these numbers.
- The plant care journal — practical, source-checked care guides.