Garden Kinship

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Kinship Core

The engine behind every real companion bond.

Garden Kinship's matchmaker. It pairs plants the way nature does — through pest biology, root architecture, bloom timing, and shelter — instead of inherited folklore. Every bond is traceable. Nothing is invented.

Kinship Core

What it is

A living web, not a static list.

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.

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

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.

Why we built it

Most companion planting advice is wrong, or unfalsifiable.

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.

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 that real gardeners could trust without becoming amateur entomologists. 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

Built like infrastructure.

No fabricated provenance

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.

Deterministic, reproducible

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.

Climate-aware

Hardiness zones, frost dates, and minimum tolerated temperatures gate every recommendation. The Core never suggests a tropical companion to a Stockholm gardener.

Engine, not feature

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.

How you use it

The Core sits underneath everything.

Mix & Match

Hand-pick a few favourites, let the Core suggest who joins them. Climate-gated, intent-aware, ready to plant.

Try Mix & Match

Catalog

Open any species page to see who it loves, who it tolerates, and the exact mechanism behind each bond.

Browse the catalog

Garden Designer

Plan beds where every neighbour earns its spot. Visual layout backed by the same engine, no second-guessing.

Open the Designer

Plant with evidence, not guesswork.

Start with a single species you love. The Core finds its real companions — the ones that earn their place by biology, not by tradition.