Those are drawings, not your plants
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The small picture beside each plant is a drawing of that crop, the same for everyone. It is not a photograph of your plant, and it does not change as your plant grows. Each drawing arrives with no background of its own, and since 23 September 2026 the app sets it on a plain tile, the same at every hour. If you have photographed a plant, your own photo is what you see on its page; the drawing is for lists, where a photo would be too small to read.
Common questions
- Is that a photo of my actual plant?
No, and it never is. It is a drawing of the crop — one per crop, the same for every gardener. Your Cherokee Purple and somebody else's Sungold both show the same tomato, because it is a picture of tomato, not of your tomato.
Where you have taken a photograph, that is what you see. A plant's own page opens on your most recent picture of it. The drawing is for lists and rows, where a photo shrinks to something you cannot read.
We would rather draw something honest than generate a fake photograph of a garden that does not exist.
- Why is the background behind them plain?
Because a plain tile is easiest to read. From 10 to 22 September the app painted a warm glow behind each drawing that followed the time of day. On the Garden screen's larger tiles it washed over the bottom of the tile, where the plant's name sits, and at night the name was hard to read. Since 23 September every drawing sits on the same quiet tile, and the name sits on the tile itself.
The drawing still holds no time of day. It is lit evenly, so it looks right on the tile morning or night.
- The drawing looks nothing like what I am growing.
Some crops are harder to draw small than others, and a few are genuinely thin. A carrot at the size it shows in a list is a narrow orange shape; a bunch of chives is narrower still.
Every picture in the set is checked at the size it actually appears, not just at full size — that check is why five of them were redrawn on 10 September. A single stem of ryegrass covered barely one percent of its space and was, in practice, invisible; it is now a tied sheaf, which is the same plant with a shape you can see.
If one still looks wrong to you, tell us — the crop it is meant to be is written down, and we would rather redraw it than argue.
- Why did all the pictures change on 10 September?
The old ones were built from hard angular facets — a style that looked sharp at full size and turned to mush at the size a plant actually shows in a list, which is where nearly all of them are seen.
All 153 were redrawn as smooth, solid shapes with real form, so a garlic reads as a garlic next to an onion. At the same time they stopped carrying their own background, so the app decides what they sit on.
The ready-made bed suggestions got pictures in the same pass — each one shows the harvest that bed actually produces, made from the crops in it and nothing else.
Shipped 2026-09-10. Last checked 2026-09-23. Something here wrong or out of date? Tell us — support docs going stale is a bug.