About Linnea

How this started

My twelve-year-old daughter came home in the spring with a list. Twenty-nine plants, to be found and pressed into a herbarium over the summer. She could not recognise any of them and had no idea where to look.

I started working through it with her, and Linnea came out of that. The same species are on these pages.

A herbarium is also a diary

The label on a herbarium sheet says where the plant was found and on what day. Years later the same herbarium shows you where you walked and in which summer. Linnea records those two things for every find, the town and the date.

Where the name comes from

Linnaea borealis, the twinflower, is a small plant that grows low on the floor of old forest, its flowers in pairs. Carl Linnaeus, who gave us the two-part names for species, chose it as his emblem and held it in his portrait.

Why a herbarium is hard to finish

Pressing a plant is easy. Recognising it, and knowing where to go looking for it, is the hard part. An adult who wants to learn what grows near the house has the same problem.

What Linnea will not do for you

Linnea does not tell you the name outright. You look at the plant, make your own guess, and Linnea tells you whether it was right. Working the name out is where the learning is, so Linnea leaves that to you.

The plant facts are not invented by a language model. Species names come from a species index and from the vernacular records held by GBIF and the Finnish Biodiversity Information Facility. Toxicity, and whether a plant may be picked, come from a reviewed table. The model writes the descriptions only, because an invented look-alike would be worse than none.

The herbarium stays on your phone

Linnea does not need an account, and no copy of your collection is stored on a server. The place you found a plant is saved precisely for your own map, but it does not leave the phone. A shared herbarium shows the name of the town and nothing more exact.

Because the herbarium is not stored anywhere else, it does not move to a new phone by itself either. It comes along if you restore a backup of the old phone, or transfer the data straight from one device to the other. There is more detail in the help pages.

What it costs

The first herbarium is free. The rest unlock with a single purchase, and there is no monthly fee.

Get in touch

Linnea is made in Finland. If a species has been identified wrong, or something is missing from these pages, send a message to elina.patjas@interlinear.tech.