Terms of Use — What Gardening Today?

By using this app you agree to what follows. It is short, and the important part is section 2.

1. What this is

What Gardening Today? is a free web app that suggests gardening jobs for the plants, tools and structures you tell it you have, adjusted for the time of year and the weather where your garden is. It is run by Dan Birchwood, an individual in the United Kingdom, as a personal project rather than a business.

It is written for gardens in the United Kingdom. The growing calendar, the weather rules and the plant list are all UK-specific, and the advice will not be right anywhere else.

2. It is guidance, not professional advice

This matters more than anything else here, so it is not buried in a list.

The app gives general gardening guidance. It is not professional horticultural, arboricultural, agricultural, veterinary or medical advice, and it is not a substitute for any of those.

The app does not know your garden. It knows what you have typed into it. It cannot see the condition of a tree, the state of a wall, how heavy a job is, whether a plant is diseased, whether something near it is poisonous, or whether you are able to do safely what it suggests. You are the one who can see the garden, and the final judgement is always yours.

In particular, please use your own judgement about:

Anything involving height, ladders, power tools or sharp tools. If a job looks beyond you, it is — get somebody in.
Trees and large structures. Work on mature trees, walls and roofs may need a qualified person. Before working on a tree, check whether it is covered by a Tree Preservation Order or stands in a conservation area — either may mean you need your council's consent or must give them notice first. Check any restrictions from your landlord too.
Identifying a plant from a photo. Where it is available, Identify from photo suggests what a plant might be. The suggestion can be wrong, especially for plants that look alike, so check it before acting on it. Never use it to decide whether a plant is safe to eat or touch, or safe near children or animals.
Anything that might be eaten. Never eat a plant, fruit, seed, berry or fungus on the strength of this app. Many common garden plants are toxic to people, and others are toxic to cats, dogs and horses.
Pesticides and weedkillers. Use only a product authorised for home garden use, and for the job in question, and follow its label exactly. For other products, follow the manufacturer's instructions. Keep them away from children and animals.
Wildlife, hedges and nests. Before cutting a hedge or working on a tree, check for active birds' nests and for protected animals such as bats. A nest is protected whenever it is in use or being built — this does not depend on a fixed season, so checking matters at any time of year.
Invasive plants. Do not plant a controlled invasive species or allow one to spread into the wild, and check the official guidance before cutting, moving or disposing of one — disposal in particular is regulated.
Local restrictions. Protected trees, wildlife rules, hosepipe and water-use bans and some hedgerow rules vary by place, and differ across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The app does not know which apply to your garden.

If anything the app suggests seems wrong, unsafe, or does not match what you can see in front of you, trust the garden and not the app — and please tell me, so I can fix it.

3. What I try to do, and what I cannot promise

The gardening content is written with care, and is reviewed when it changes or when somebody reports a problem. Even so, it is general advice applied to a garden I have never seen, and it may be wrong, out of date, or unsuitable for your particular case. The weather comes from a third-party service and may be inaccurate or unavailable.

The app is provided as it is. I do not promise that it will always be available, that it will be free of faults, or that it will continue to exist. It is a personal project: it may change, and it may one day stop. If I intend to stop it, I will give you what warning I reasonably can, so you have a chance to note down anything you want to keep.

4. Your account

5. Using it sensibly

Please do not attempt to break into, overload, scrape or disrupt the service, or use it to store or send anything unlawful. Beyond that there is no hidden restriction — you are welcome to use the app for what it is for, as often as you like.

6. Who owns what

The original wording, design, code and arrangement of the gardening content are mine, and are protected by copyright and database rights. That does not give me ownership of gardening facts or common knowledge — nobody owns those. Please do not copy substantial parts of the app, or republish its content as your own. You are entirely welcome to follow it in your garden, tell people about it, and quote a bit of it with a link back.

What you put into the app — your gardens, your plants, the names you give them — remains yours. You give me permission to store, process and display it only as far as is needed to run the app for you, including showing a shared garden to the people you have shared it with.

Photos you upload remain yours. Only upload, or ask the app to identify, a photo you took or have permission to use here. The permission above covers resizing, storing and displaying photos as needed to provide photos of garden items and of your own jobs in the app, and sending a photo you choose to identify to the plant identification service so it can suggest what the plant is. Photo processing, storage, identification and removal are explained in the Privacy Notice.

7. Feedback

If you send feedback or suggest an improvement, I may act on it and build it, without owing you anything for it. I mention this only so the position is clear; it is not an attempt to take anything from you, and nothing you send is used for any other purpose. What is sent along with your message is set out in the Privacy Notice.

8. Liability

The app gives general guidance based on limited information. I am not responsible for loss caused by information you entered incorrectly or incompletely, by conditions the app could not reasonably know about, or by using the app contrary to the safety guidance in section 2.

If I fail to use reasonable care and skill, I am responsible for loss or damage that is a reasonably foreseeable result of that. I am not responsible for loss that was not reasonably foreseeable, or for business losses, because the app is meant for personal use.

9. Changes to these terms

I may make reasonable changes to these terms when the app changes, or to reflect changes in the law, in security, or in how the service runs.

If a change affects your rights or responsibilities, I will explain it in the app before it takes effect and ask you to accept the new terms before carrying on. Small wording or formatting corrections may be made without a separate notice.

10. Law, and getting in touch

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction. If you live elsewhere in the UK, you keep the right to bring proceedings in your own part of it.

For anything at all — a question, a complaint, a wrong instruction, a plant missing from the list or one that should not be on it — email whatgardeningtoday@gmail.com. A real person reads it.