About
Matthew Moughtin
Engineer, gardener and the maker of Raychis.
I built Raychis and its on-device identification model, and I write the plant guides, the problem pages, the field notes and the occasional longer story on this site. I am an engineer and a keen gardener rather than a botanist or a toxicologist, so I write the guides by carefully compiling published authorities rather than from any expertise of my own.
Gardening across climates
I have lived and gardened in Hong Kong, Singapore, Italy, the United States and the UK, and done conservation work in sub-Saharan Africa. That is a lot of different climates to have kept plants alive in, from the humid tropics to a Mediterranean summer to a cold northern winter. That first-hand experience of different challenges in different parts of the world is the perspective I write these guides from.
The same plant behaves differently in each of those places, so advice tied to one country is close to useless to a reader living somewhere else. The guides here describe a plant against its climate and region instead. A word like "hardy" only means something where it was written, and it means something completely different in Nairobi and in Anchorage. Growing tomatoes in North America means fighting hornworms; in the UK that pest does not exist and the short growing season is the problem instead.
How the guides are written
Every guide names its sources. A toxicity level is checked against the RHS list of potentially harmful plants and the ASPCA database of plants toxic to cats, dogs and horses; a pest or disease control is checked against NC State Extension, the AHDB and the like; and each of those citations sits on the page it supports rather than in a bibliography nobody reads. Where two sources disagree, the page says so.
Poisoning advice is labelled by country and gives a number a reader can call wherever they are, if one is available. Pest control advice focuses on natural measures and only recommends a spray as a last resort, and only where it is legal.
The build, in the open
Raychis identifies 5,000 species on the device, offline and with no account. Getting a model that small to that point took about a year, most of it uncertain, and I wrote it up as it happened. Thefield notes are that series, and theoffline identification page is what it produced.