Why Liana exists
It started with
one lost plant.
Shelley
Maker of Liana · Melbourne
I bought my first plants as decoration. I’d show the nursery a photo of a dark hallway or a dim corner and ask what would live there. “That bird of paradise will be fine—it just won’t get too big.”
So I bought the bird of paradise. Then I watered it weekly, or when it looked sad, which was most of the time, and waited for it to not get too big. Some of the others thrived. Most struggled. I had no idea why, and I wasn’t curious enough to ask.
Until the bird of paradise.
I hated watching it go downhill. I tried everything I could find and nothing worked—I’d started far too late. It’s the one plant I lost that I still think about, and it’s probably the reason I started paying attention to the rest.
“Plants are such a long game
that my memory couldn’t keep up.”
When I sold my business I got a bit lost in the what-next, and the plants filled the gap. I started asking Artificial Intelligence why they were struggling. Then I took ten million photos and had a million chats, moved plants around chasing better light, repotted half of them, bought more, and completely lost track of where I was up to with each one.
A lot of it was a rescue mission for plants I’d been getting wrong for years.
I learned quickly what AI is good at and what it isn’t. It’s confident no matter how much it actually knows. It’s only useful if you tell it everything, truthfully, every single time—and then it forgets it all by the next conversation.
I tried projects. I tried spreadsheets. My family thought I’d gone mad. There were fungus gnats in every room. The jungle kept growing and the tracking had become its own hobby.
Moved closer to the window.
New leaf—finally.
By then I was attached. When a plant went backwards after advice I’d trusted, it hurt. In community groups I saw people doing it on vibes, people watering to a schedule and shrugging when something died, and a lot of people like me asking how on earth you keep a collection sorted.
I have a process-driven brain. I knew this could be a real thing.
My fiddle leaf fig still isn’t fully recovered, but I can scroll back through its Journey and see how far it’s come. That’s enough to make me want to see what happens next.
I’m not a plant expert and I’m not going to pretend to be one. I’m someone who got deep into plants, couldn’t find a tool that kept up, and knew how to build one.
The people who’ve been doing this for decades know things I don’t, and I’d rather build Liana with them than guess. If you’re one of them, I want to hear what it needs to become.
Shelley
The name
Liana
A long-standing love of vines—the way they climb, trail and become part of the spaces around them. Liana carried that botanical connection and simply felt right to say and to see.
A living collection.
Help shape Liana
What does your collection need?
Liana is being built for the depth, habits and odd little realities of established collections. If there’s something it should understand, I’d genuinely like to hear it.
Write to Shelley
Liana is growing
Beautiful today.
Richer over time. Yours.
Join the waitlist to hear when Liana is ready for your collection.
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