How AI may help gardens of the future
Award-winning designer Tom Massey looks at how technology could make gardeners’ lives easier.
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.Do you have trouble remembering to water your plants, or find it impossible to assess how dry your soil is? Or wonder how the weather is going to affect your garden?
Help is at hand, says RHS Chelsea Flower Show gold-medallist Tom Massey, who will be designing a garden that harnesses the power of Artificial Intelligence at next year’s event. The Avanade ‘Intelligent’ Garden, which will be co-designed by Je Ahn, includes a curated selection of climate-resilient plants and trees which will be monitored by AI.
“AI is already in our lives and as a horticulture industry it can provide lots of benefits – we might as well embrace it and use platforms like Chelsea to show how it can be a force for good,” says Massey.
His AI show garden will feature sensors in the soil which look at the pH, moisture and nutrient levels, giving insights on how to address any problems, as well as air-quality monitors. It will also incorporate weather monitors to forecast temperatures – so if there’s going to be a heatwave or a gale-force wind, it will alert gardeners in advance to prepare so they don’t lose plants.
“You could save thousands of litres of water in a single garden and if you roll that out across all gardens, or all big developments, the amount of water we could save would be astronomical, which can help us in our fight against climate change.
“The technology exists for it all to be wireless and a small hub will gather all that information and send it to the cloud.”
Massey believes that in the next decade, aspects of AI will be used in the garden, such as optimising watering systems.
These might include having sensors in your garden which tell you how moist your soil is, when it’s going to rain and when it’s going to be really hot, and optimising watering schedules to meet those demands, rather than just watering every day for an hour regardless of the weather and regardless of what’s going on in the soil itself.
“Up-skilling people, giving them more advice, more insights and more data about their gardens can allow them to be more sustainable, to garden and grow in a way that will be better for the planet and help us combat the effects of climate change.”
He predicts that AI development for gardens will not take long.
“Already the RHS is implementing AI into their apps, so it’s already accessible. In Google search you get an AI overview, so AI is here in our lives already, and I don’t think it’s going to be that long before there are systems available to gardeners that utilise a similar technology to what we are designing for Chelsea, and allow those systems to be implemented in residential homes.”
He hopes that AI won’t encourage gardeners to become lazier, but does believe it will give them more time, using an analogy of analogue tools versus power tools.
Would people rather rake up every leaf rather than use a leaf blower, use a manual mower rather than a robotic one, or manually prune a hedge with shears over a hedge trimmer, or in design terms draw by hand or use a computer to design a garden? he asks.
“We’ve embraced technology throughout history to speed up processes, to make us more efficient, to save us time to spend with family or socialise with friends, so hopefully AI and technology in gardening will just allow us more time for the more enjoyable aspects of gardening,” he says.
However, Sarah Plested, owner of Bramley Apple Garden Design and a garden design lecturer at Capel Manor, London’s environmental college, says that AI is still a long way off in any way being a substitute for garden designers.
As far as design work goes, she observes that AI is “way off, because every project and every single site is so different and every client is different.
“It’s not a matter of collating information just from hundreds of different gardens and slapping it down there, because you have to understand a client brief. Most of my job is about the relationship with my client and the way we work together and me understanding the client and what they need out of their garden.
“People need that personal interaction, they need to talk it through and they need me to understand what they want in their lives and how it’s going to work. People are investing in you.
“I struggle to see where AI can support that, even in the near future.”
The RHS will use AI to help build a knowledge bank of cultivated plants for specific uses, such as pollination, pollution capture and water management, as it launches a new five-year programme of work to commence in 2025.
Plants for Purpose will see the charity work in collaboration with the University of Nottingham to develop a deep-learning tool that will identify characteristics among the more than 400,000 different plant cultivars found in the UK, which the RHS and wider industry research has shown to be beneficial.
The knowledge bank will include plants for biodiversity, health and wellbeing, thermal regulation and carbon capture, helping to grow the pool of plants used by gardeners and mitigating the effects of the biodiversity crisis, climate change and urbanisation.