The Next Big Thing In Gardening: Talking Plants?

New gardeners have so much to learn about how to care for their gardens. Selecting the right plants for their hardiness zone is just the beginning. Next they have to learn how to tell when those plants need water, or more fertilizer, or to be pruned. More experienced gardeners are often looking to enhance and expand their skills. No matter your skill level, the Chelsea Flower Show in the UK is an important event for anyone in the gardening sphere.

What is the Chelsea Flower Show?

The Chelsea Flower Show is put on every year by the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS). Most awards are judged by a carefully curated panel of gardening experts. According to the RHS, that panel generally includes “horticulturalists, garden designers, landscape architects, contractors, head gardeners, journalists or writers, and lecturers.” However, visitors also get to vote on certain awards. This practice allows all facets of the community to judge the gardens.

What’s Unique This Year?

This year, one entrant is aiming to present a futuristic garden: one that can talk back to you. Designer Tom Massey, working with Microsoft, plans to enter a garden that uses AI to communicate its needs. His goal is to embed soil sensors for as many of the garden’s needs as possible. These sensors will connect to a computer that can translate the soil readings into plain answers about what the garden needs.

He hopes that this technology can soon be used at a wider scale to usher in a new era of eco-conscious gardening. If gardeners can tell exactly how moist the soil is, they can be even more precise in their watering, for example. If enough people can implement something like this, Massey thinks, there could be a significant positive impact on water use.

AI and Resources

It is important to note here that generative AI consumes vast quantities of resources. So, we should not utilize it frivolously. According to Cindy Gorton, a contributor to Forbes, the data centers that power generative AI use “cooling towers and air mechanisms to dissipate heat, causing up to 9 liters of water to evaporate per kWh of energy used.” Water is already a scarce resource. It is our duty to be mindful of how we consume it and what we are doing to safeguard it. After all, you can’t nourish a garden without water.

Sources

AI Is Accelerating the Loss of Our Scarcest Natural Resource: Water, Forbes, 2024