Free garden planner — save plants, plan beds, and get sowing reminders for your spot.
Sign up freeKinship Core
Garden Kinship's matchmaker. It pairs plants the way nature does — through pest biology, root architecture, bloom timing, and shelter — not because your gran's almanac said so. Every bond is traceable. Nothing is invented.
What it is
Companion planting guides usually look like spreadsheets — "tomato likes basil, dislikes brassicas" — copied between sites for decades without anyone checking. Kinship Core takes a different approach: it models the actual mechanisms (a beneficial insect, a soil-layer overlap, a shading effect) and lets pairings emerge from those. When the underlying science updates, the entire web updates with it.
Tap to bloom · hold for info
790 species · 432 top kindred bonds shown · live from the catalog
Pest biology
Every pest-deterrent pairing traces back to documented insect behaviour — which beneficial predator each pest attracts, which volatile compounds confuse oviposition, which trap-crops draw aphids away.
Root science
Depth, spread, and exudate profiles decide whether two plants share or compete for the same soil layer. Deep tap-roots paired with shallow feeders, nitrogen-fixers next to heavy nitrogen users — only when the biology lines up.
Pollinator support
Bloom-time overlap, nectar accessibility, and which insect families a flower actually feeds — not just "attracts bees" as a blanket label. Specific bees, hoverflies, parasitoid wasps.
Shade, shelter, mulch
Pest biology
Root science
Pollinator support
Shade, shelter, mulch
Why we built it
The classic claims — "marigolds repel everything", "never plant carrots near tomatoes", "basil saves your basil" — survive because they sound plausible and nobody loses anything by repeating them. Some are true. Many aren't. A few are exactly backwards. Nobody's keeping score.
Time-tested systems like the Three Sisters earn their place on different ground: not one mechanism, but a whole micro-climate of them — the corn as trellis, the squash as living mulch, the beans as a slow nitrogen contribution over the next season. The Core respects systems like that and models the parts it can verify.
We wanted a tool real gardeners could actually trust — without having to get a PhD in entomology first. So we built one where every bond has a documented mechanism — an insect named, a study cited, a root profile compared — and a guard rail that refuses to ship a bond without one. If the evidence is weak, the bond isn't there. If it's strong, it's permanent until something better comes along.
The result is a smaller, sturdier graph than any folk-list — and one that grows every time the underlying research does.
Strengths
Every claim about why two species pair has a citable source. A guard rail in the build pipeline rejects anything without one — the bar to ship a new bond is real evidence, not consensus folklore.
Same inputs always yield the same matches. The constellation you see on the homepage is the same one a downstream API call would produce — no hidden randomness, no drift.
Hardiness zones, frost dates, and minimum tolerated temperatures gate every recommendation. The Core never suggests a tropical companion to a Stockholm gardener.
How you use it
Hand-pick a few favourites, let the Core suggest who joins them. Climate-gated, intent-aware, ready to plant.
Open any species page to see who it loves, who it tolerates, and the exact mechanism behind each bond.
Plan beds where every neighbour earns its spot. Visual layout backed by the same engine, no second-guessing.
Start with one species you love. The Core finds who belongs next to it — earned by biology, not by someone's great-uncle insisting on it.
Architectural pairings: tall species protecting tender understorey, sprawling cover stabilising soil moisture, living mulch keeping weed pressure low. Calibrated to canopy density and growth rate, not vibes.
Kinship Core is a shared library underneath Mix & Match, the Designer, the catalog, and the planner. One source of truth for every part of Garden Kinship that touches relationships.
