Where the data comes from
The source
The listings are built from OpenStreetMap, queried through the public Overpass API and used under the ODbL 1.0 licence. OpenStreetMap is mapped by volunteers, and this site would not exist without them.
We pulled every US record tagged as a garden centre, plant nursery or plant shop, then recovered a city and state for each one using the free US Census geocoder. No paid data provider is involved anywhere in the pipeline.
What we filter out
- Big-box garden departments — Walmart, Home Depot, Lowe's, Menards, Meijer and the rest.
- Wholesale landscape supply, irrigation and hardscape yards.
- Records with no name, which cannot be a useful listing.
- Duplicates, where a mapper recorded both a point and a building for the same shop.
That filtering removed roughly a third of the raw records, and 115 more were merged as duplicates.
How shop types are decided
OpenStreetMap has no tag for "houseplant boutique", so the shop type and specialty labels are inferred from each business's own name and tags. That inference is imperfect. A shop called "Green Thumb" tells us nothing, and it will sit in the general garden center bucket even if it is a dedicated indoor plant store. Corrections are welcome.
The honest limitations
- Urban shops are under-represented. Volunteer mapping covers suburban nurseries well and small city storefronts poorly. In several major metros we can confirm we hold roughly half the shops that exist.
- Nothing here is inspected by us. We have not visited these shops. A listing is a pointer, not a recommendation.
- Closures lag. A shop that shut last month may still be mapped. Call before you drive.
- Hours are often missing or stale. Only 746 of 3,853 listings carry opening hours at all.
Fixing something
Send a correction through the submit form. If you want the fix to benefit every map and app rather than just this site, edit it directly in OpenStreetMap — it will reach us on the next refresh.