About Linnea

How Linnea began

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 recognised some of them, but not all, and had no idea where to look for the rest. The school suggested a plant identification app, which was hard to use.

So I made a better one. I wanted her to be able to concentrate on what matters: finding the plants and learning about them. 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. Add instructions about name tags, camera angles and field notes, and the plants themselves slip into the background. An adult who wants to learn what grows near the house has the same problem.

Guess it yourself, or let Linnea identify it

You photograph the plant and Linnea tells you what it is. If you want to learn the species, you can guess the name first and Linnea will tell you whether you were right. Both ways work.

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.

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.