Kepthouse's plant species catalogue and care recommendations are assembled from a mixture of open data, permissively licensed datasets, and hand-curated entries. This page lists every source used, its licence, and how it's attributed inside the app.
Non-affiliation: Kepthouse is not affiliated with the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), the Met Office, GBIF, Wikidata, the Wikimedia Foundation, or any of the other projects listed below. Their names and data are used under open licences or fair-use attribution.
Backbone dataset of accepted plant species names, family classification, and synonyms. Around 350,000 vascular plant species are ingested into the Kepthouse server and used as the authoritative source for scientific name resolution.
Citation: GBIF Secretariat (2023). GBIF Backbone Taxonomy. Checklist dataset. https://doi.org/10.15468/39omei
Reference data for taxon properties, multi-language common names, Wikimedia Commons images, and cross-references to other databases.
Short descriptive summaries and plant image URLs used on the species info card. Image URLs reference Wikimedia Commons directly and are not rehosted.
Care data (RHS hardiness rating, sunlight preference, watering frequency, soil pH range, flowering and pruning months, edibility flags) for roughly 50 popular UK garden species has been hand-curated by the developer from publicly available sources, including RHS online guidance and horticultural references. The compiled table is Kepthouse's own copyright; the underlying facts are not. Community corrections submitted through the app are reviewed manually and merged into this dataset.
Typical last-spring and first-autumn frost dates by UK postcode area, derived from publicly cited RHS regional averages based on Met Office climate normals. Covers all 124 UK postcode areas grouped into 15 climate regions. Approximate; not recommended for commercial horticultural planning.
Statutory and notifiable UK plant pests and diseases, with host-plant associations, common names, and taxonomy. Sourced from the Plant Health Risk Register and the linked per-pest detail endpoints, refreshed weekly on the Kepthouse server. When the app shows a pest alert for one of your plants, the underlying data comes from this register and links back to the authoritative Risk Register page.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Curated dataset of around 13,000 verified interactions between Great Britain’s phytophagous insects (and mites) and their host plants, compiled from entomological journals and field guides. Used by the Kepthouse plant pest lookup to populate insect-pest associations for common UK garden and amenity plants. Each pest record links back to the source database.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence.
English common names for the insects/pests in the BRC DBIF dataset are looked up from GBIF’s vernacular-name service so the app can display “codling moth” alongside “Cydia pomonella”. Where GBIF does not hold an English common name the scientific name is used alone.
Kepthouse does not scrape, rehost, or redistribute content from the RHS Plant Finder, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew databases, Gardeners' World, nursery catalogues, Thompson & Morgan, Orange Pippin, or any other copyright-protected plant database. Plant facts (e.g. "Bramley is a cooking apple pollination group 3") are not copyrightable in the UK, but curated compilations and editorial selections are — so those stay out.