Review: Like That Garden app helps you ID flowers (sort of)
Perhaps you know someone like this. (Please, tell me you know someone like this).
You'll be walking along, chatting to said person, when you realize you are talking to the air. Turning around, you will see that your companion has wandered off to a nearby yard or pathway or even a median strip.
"I like this plant," he or she will say. But unless you're a horticulturist or wandering in an arboretum, there's usually no way to identify the plant.
Like That Garden has come to your rescue. The company - whose slogan is "Making visual search an everyday reality" - has apps that allow you to search from an image to find furniture and plants, and expects to add an app soon for clothing.
I downloaded the plant app, eager to identify the plants that my husband, Darryl (he's the wanderer), thinks might work in our yard. Then I immediately set out to test Like That at the house of my neighbor Ruth, who is a master gardener and has a yard full of blooms from spring to fall.
I started snapping away but soon realized that the app doesn't so much definitively identify plants as suggest what they might be. I moved on to a plant I knew and snapped again. Yep: peony.
I had less luck a few days later, when Ruth and another neighbor, Irene, were debating whether the plants in Irene's yard were weeds. I tried to settle the dispute using Like That, but, alas, the exact plant didn't come up. There's an information icon next to each potential match, so you can check to see whether the match is even a possibility. But if it's not, you'll have to take more photos, and you might not always have time for that.
When you do have time, the app can at least provide a good start. For example, I've often wondered what that small tree with the tufted pinkish-white blooms is. So, when I saw it on a hike in Rock Creek Park, I whipped out my cellphone, snapped a picture and waited for Like That to do its magic.
It came up with 10 possibilities, the most likely being a coastal woodfern. This wasn't right: First, the app clearly was focusing only on the leaves; and second, "coastal" in this case referred to the West Coast. None of the other possibilities seemed to be my plant, either.
I ran a different photo in my camera roll through the app, and this time it offered the powder puff tree, which wasn't quite right, either. After more searching online, based on that suggestion, I finally came up with the likely suspect, and suspect it was, indeed: the mimosa tree, which is invasive.
So, I'm not sure visual search is an "everyday reality" yet. But it's getting there. And our yard will be improving as it does.
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Stats
Like That Garden
Operating system: iOS, Android
User ratings: Apple: Four and a half out of five stars (158 ratings);
Google Play: Four and a half out of five stars (1,471 ratings)