A New Gardening App for the iPad

There are so many ideas fizzing out of the new gardening app Into Gardens launched this week, that the hand can’t help reaching for pen and paper. Not necessary. It takes notes for you and also shops, gives out sensible advice, and makes you laugh. And, somebody has realized the sparkling potential of digital garden photography.

That somebody is James Alexander-Sinclair, the British garden designer who conceived and begat the app. It is edited by Tiffany Daneff “but I tend to breathe over her shoulder a lot,” explains James. “Our idea is to be the voice of flippant authority.”

Above: Into Gardens, £2.99 or $4.50 in the US, also concerns itself with eating what you grow and Mark Diacono (on fruit, above) is typical of the caliber of contributor: not to be argued with and very funny.

Above: Into Gardens has interactive captions, so important for the detailed mind, and useful when taking the iPad shopping. And it refuses to be dull. Followers of Alexander-Sinclair’s Blogging from Blackpitts, a regular on the Gardenista Newsstand, will know that he likes to lower the tone. On the Chelsea Flower Show: “This will, I believe, be a very short blogpost as time is pressing but I thought I had better write something lest there is concern for my continued existence. Especially as today I managed to reverse my car into a hearse.”