About EcoSphere
Open science about the ground, read carefully.
EcoSphere answers questions with real data: what is in the soil under a place, which plant is which and where it grows, and what the monks of a ninth-century garden wrote about the plants they kept. It is made by one person, it is entirely non-commercial, and it has no advertising, no accounts and no tracking.
Until September 2026 this was two sites — EcoSphere for the soil and Herbularius for the physic garden. They are one site now, because they were always about the same thing. Every old Herbularius address leads to its page here.
Nothing here is advice — not medical, not agricultural, not environmental, not financial. A modelled soil figure is not a test of your garden, and a plant name is not a statement that the plant is safe.
The three parts
Look up any plant in the world
More than 446,842 accepted species, by common or scientific name, in English or Dutch. Each has its own page: family, common names, where it grows and a photograph.
Plants →Measure the soil under a place
Type a town, an address or a postcode and descend through the ground beneath it: the carbon in the topsoil, the stock in the top thirty centimetres, and the fungi recorded nearby.
Soil →Walk the medieval physic garden
Sixteen beds from the Plan of St Gall, drawn around 820: what the monks wrote about each plant, and what is known now about the risk.
Physic garden →