How this library is made

The Nature Library has two parts. The codex is 791 hand-edited specimen sheets: plants that heal, feed and poison; fungi; a birding codex with field marks, songs and look-alikes; fishes, reptiles, amphibians, mammals and invertebrates. Each sheet records what the organism can do, whether and how it is eaten, how healers have used it and how strong the modern evidence is, what its fruit and seed look like, and how to grow it. Every sheet is also available in Spanish.

The open stacks are everything else: any of the more than two million named species can be looked up, and its page is assembled live from the sources below, including the relevant sections of its Wikipedia article quoted as written. Where an Anthropic API key is configured, a librarian (Claude, an AI model) also reads the whole article and extracts structured field notes, leaving a field blank when the article is silent rather than filling it in.

The Plate Room holds 31,861historical illustrations matched from the Source Library. The Identification Desk runs BioCLIP, an open vision model trained on more than ten million images across the tree of life, inside the visitor's own browser: the photograph never leaves the device. It compares each photo against the 10,000 most-recorded species on iNaturalist, then against up to 10,000 more within whichever groups the photo resembles.

The Catalogue of All Life opens the GBIF Backbone Taxonomy, millions of names assembled from Catalogue of Life and hundreds of other checklists, so every catalogued species has a page here, reachable by walking down the tree or from a country's complete list of recorded species.

The Herball Room presents John Gerard's Herball of 1597 chapter by chapter. It was the great English herbal of its age rather than the first: Dioscorides, the Hortus Sanitatis (1491) and Fuchs (1542) came before it, and Gerard built heavily on Dodoens. The Garden Planner reads ten years of your local weather to find your hardiness zone and lists the codex plants that will survive your winters.

Nothing in this library is medical advice, and no identification, from this site or anywhere else, is a reason to eat a wild plant or fungus. Medicinal entries describe historical and traditional use alongside an honest rating of the evidence.