GimmeBlooms is opinionated about plants, but we're not making the data up. Every flower in our 150+ curated library is cross-referenced against authoritative horticultural sources, and the creative assets we use are properly licensed. This page is the receipts.
Plant data sources
Bloom months, USDA zone hardiness, sun and water requirements, pollinator value, and toxicity flags are aggregated from the following public horticultural databases. Where sources disagree, we defer to the more conservative figure (e.g., narrower zone range).
- USDA PLANTS Database — authoritative US flora taxonomy, native range, and growth habit. plants.sc.egov.usda.gov
- USA National Phenology Network (USA-NPN) — observed bloom timing across regions, used to calibrate our bloom-window tables. usanpn.org
- USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map (2023) — official USDA hardiness zones used for ZIP-to-zone lookup. planthardiness.ars.usda.gov
- Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center — native plant database for the US, with strong coverage of regional natives and pollinator-friendly species. wildflower.org
- Missouri Botanical Garden Plant Finder — cultivar-level horticultural notes, especially for ornamentals. missouribotanicalgarden.org
- National Wildlife Federation — Native Plant Finder — host-plant data for native pollinators and Lepidoptera support. nwf.org/NativePlantFinder
- Audubon Native Plants Database — ZIP-keyed native plant recommendations and the bird species each plant supports. audubon.org/native-plants
- University extension services — regional planting calendars and frost-date tables from land-grant university extensions (Cornell, UMass, Virginia Tech, UCANR, and others). Cited per-flower where used.
Frost dates & growing seasons
First-frost and last-frost dates are derived from NOAA climate normals (1991–2020) cross-referenced with USA-NPN observations and university extension publications. NOAA U.S. Climate Normals.
Creative assets
Most flower illustrations on GimmeBlooms are original SVGs we drew in-house. A handful are adapted from public-domain or Creative-Commons-licensed sources, attributed below.
- Rose silhouette— adapted from "Nepalese Election Symbol Rose" by Syafa Studio, sourced from Wikimedia Commons under CC BY 3.0. Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 3.0
- USDA hardiness zone TopoJSON — base map for the zones page is built on us-atlas (TopoJSON) rendered with d3-geo. Both released under permissive open-source licenses.
Open-source software
GimmeBlooms is built on the open-source ecosystem. Major libraries we rely on include Next.js, React, Tailwind CSS, Drizzle ORM, Zod, and the Vercel deployment platform. License notices for all dependencies are preserved in our build artifacts and available on request.
Spotted an error?
Plant data is messy and sources occasionally disagree. If you find a flower in our library with the wrong zone range, bloom window, or pollinator status, please let us know — we'll re-check against the sources above and correct it.
Email hello@gimmeblooms.com with the flower name and the discrepancy.