After a first round of partially successful testing of the PlantSnap app a couple of days ago, I decided to give it another go this morning, focusing on leaves and trees this time.

The test subjects

Bay leaf

PlantSnap came up with "Black Mangrove", which this Bay Leaf plant most certainly isn't. To its credit, the second choice was laurus nobilis, or bay laurel. Good effort!

Lemon tree

Our lemon tree, which we know is a lemon tree because it produces lemons

I don't know what PlantSnap was thinking with this one, but it was completely baffled by the lemon tree. It suggested something called acronychia heterophylla, which either sounds like a disease or a lifestyle preference, but not a lemon tree. I disabused it of this idea and hopefully future lemon tree seekers won't be confronted with a homophobe who's out of time. (I know, I know - crono and chrono/phylla and phile have different roots. Work with me on this.)

This was PlantSnap's take:

Image source https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronychia

Me no see no lemon dere.

Acanthus

Now we were getting somewhere! PlantSnap confidently identified this Acanthus in seconds, only from the leaves.

I could have been kind and tried it on the basis of its distinctive flowers, shown below, but the leaves were good enough for a 100% first time accurate identification.

Brush Cherry, aka Magenta Lilly Pilly or syzygium paniculatum

This test was also a little tricky, as the tree has not yet borne fruit this season, and its fruit are highly distinctive.

Here's what you can expect in full summer:

Image source

Did I say they're distinctive? They're distinctive.

The birds love them, and mothers around the country are furious when kids run through the berries on the ground then tromp the pink mush on their soles through the house.

Camphor tree

At least I think it's a camphor tree. Frankly, I'm no wiser because PlantSnap thought it was a ficus. That, friends, is no ficus!

Here's what it looks like when it's flowering:

How to load photos

There are two basic choices, to take a photo of the plant to be identified in situ (in fragrante delicto, as it were), or to go to an album to choose a photo. One of the menu items there is to "Open from...", with Dropbox as an option. Yippee, sez I to myself, off I go to my mammoth collection of garden photos from September 2017. Salviating (sorry, once I let one out, they all want out) with anticipation, I selected a particularly fetching photo of the bottle brush tree in flower.

Nothing. The photo doesn't load into the app. I tried again and briefly saw a flash of an error message about the file format, but since the photos in my collection are all the same format as those taken today, I'm a bit mystified and will kick that mystery can down the road to solve another day.

Today's conclusion

The app and its wrangler (moi) still have some work to do to be able to collaborate together seamlessly, although we did have a resounding success with the Acanthus and muted joy on the Bay Leaf.

I'll keep on PlantSnapping!

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