Changelog — FloraPlot

v2.0 Current

Map your garden with your camera — the biggest release yet.

Add zones with your camera (Premium) — walk round your garden and mark each bed, lawn, tree, building and fence on the ground with your iPhone. FloraPlot measures them, places them on the satellite map for you to line up, and works out the sun and shade straight away
Measure height with the camera (Premium) — point your phone at a tree, shed or wall to get its real height, including a method for something you can't walk up to, like a neighbour's tree
Measure slope with the camera (Premium) — point it at a sloping lawn or bed to get the angle and which way it faces, so sun and shade start from real numbers instead of a guess
Back up your garden — save to a file and restore it on a new phone or after a reinstall. Free for everyone
A clearer map — the satellite view is now always on, with simple zoom buttons above it and more room for the map itself; if the satellite picture can't load, you can carry on drawing on a grid
The How to use guide now starts with the quickest way to map your garden

v1.10

A tidying-up release — nothing new to look at, several things easier to trust.

Stray zone detection — spots a zone drawn far from the rest of your garden (for example, one made while you were somewhere else), tells you how far away it is, and lets you remove them all in one go. Strays no longer affect your garden's shade
Delete a zone from the Zones tab, not just on the map — other zones keep their names when you do
Garden location check — if your garden's location drifts from where your zones actually are, FloraPlot tells you and can move it back with one tap, so sun and shade stay accurate
"Where would it do best?" now warns about bad plant combinations in a suggested spot
Sun readings for pots and other small zones now say they're taken at the zone's centre
Faster tab switching, and changes on one screen now show everywhere immediately — including shade, which updates as soon as a bed or lawn is drawn beyond the already-calculated area

v1.9

Tell FloraPlot about a plant, and it will suggest where in your garden it's most likely to do well.

Suggested planting spots for anything in My Plants, ranked, with the reason each zone was ruled in or out
Add a plant without deciding where it goes — it waits under "Not yet placed" until you want the suggestion
A note on any bed whose sun will change materially as your trees grow, so a shrub meant to live there for years isn't put somewhere that will be shade in ten (Premium)
Clearer zone outlines over satellite imagery
On iOS 26, a refreshed look

v1.8

Everything you draw can now be changed.

Edit any zone after drawing it — move it, resize it, rotate it, or drag individual corners into shape
Line zones for fences and walls, drawn along whichever way they actually run, so their shadow falls where it really would
Name your zones straight from the map, instead of hunting through "bed 3" and "bed 4"
Shade at mature size — see what a spot will be like once your trees have grown, without changing anything about your garden today
Smoother panning and a closer zoom level for placing things accurately
Bigger, clearer controls throughout, and native iOS icons

v1.7

A full rebuild of the shade engine, and the plant database more than doubled.

Shade engine rebuilt from scratch — sun hours calculated on a grid across the whole garden, not a single verdict per zone
Heatmap view with a month scrubber, so you can see how shade shifts across the year
15-minute integration steps, validated against US Naval Observatory data, 257 automated tests
Plant database: 600 plants total (up from 250) — 100 free (up from 50)

v1.6

A small maintenance release.

v1.5.0

Structures got more realistic, and iPad became fully supported.

Custom structure heights, and covered growing — greenhouses, polytunnels, cold frames and cloches, heated or not, with their own soil mix
Soil texture added — sand/silt/clay classification alongside pH and organic carbon
Map screen layout improved; satellite provider list simplified; attribution added
Full iPad support
Bad plant combination warnings — flags known antagonistic pairings when two plants share a zone

v1.0 29 July 2026

First release on the App Store.