The full version of the notice you see around the site.
Printed on card #47, reproduced here word for word.
This deck is for educational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Always properly identify plants before use and consult a qualified healthcare professional before using any herbal remedies, especially if you are pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or have a medical condition. Some plants may cause allergic reactions or toxicity if misused.
Plant availability may vary by region. This deck focuses on species commonly found across much of the United States.
General practice, not advice about any particular species.
A card, an app, or a photograph is not an identification. Confirm any wild plant against reliable regional references and, where you can, qualified local expertise. If you are not certain, you have not identified it — and “fairly sure” is not certain.
Several common plants have look-alikes that range from unpleasant to deadly, and the resemblance is often closest at exactly the growth stage people go looking. Where a card in this deck prints a warning about a look-alike, that warning is shown on the plant’s page before anything else.
This site is built around recording plants you have found. Logging a discovery is a note that you saw something; it is not a confirmation that you identified it correctly, and it never makes a plant safe to eat, drink, or apply to skin.
The cards describe how plants have been used traditionally and historically. That a practice is old does not mean it works, and does not mean it is safe. Where a plant has been studied, that research is a separate matter and is cited separately.
Plants interact with medications and with existing conditions. The deck’s own disclaimer singles out pregnancy, nursing, taking medication, and having a medical condition — speak to a healthcare professional first in any of those cases.
A plant that is fine for most people can still cause a reaction in you, including on skin contact alone. Reactions can also appear on a later exposure after an uneventful first one.
Roadsides, treated lawns, industrial edges and waterways downstream of them can leave residues on a plant that identification tells you nothing about. Foraging on land also carries rules that vary by country, state and site — check them, and leave enough that the patch is still there next year.
One card in the deck carries a printed warning. Each is shown on that plant’s page above anything else, and is never hidden behind a tap — including while the card is still undiscovered.
2 plants carry a caution their cards do not print. The deck is printed, so where a well-documented risk is missing from a card, the site is the only place it can be said. Each is shown on that plant’s page at the same weight as a printed warning, and labelled as added here so the card in your hand is never misquoted.
Every plant field on this site — traits, compounds, taste, preparations, usable parts, season, encounter rate — is transcribed directly from that plant’s own Plantdex card, including the card’s own wording. For Collection 01 that card is the printed one in the deck; Field Cards are digital-only Plantdex cards earned with XP, and have no printed counterpart. Nothing presented as the card’s own text has been added, expanded or paraphrased.
Where a card contains an error, it is transcribed as printed and recorded separately rather than quietly corrected, so the site and the deck in your hands never disagree.
The site does add three things, and each says so where it appears: a note on the cards with a known printing error; on the few plants where a well-documented risk is missing from the card, a caution labelled as added here; and on every plant, field notes on how to recognise it, where it grows and what it is commonly confused with — none of which any card prints. Anything the site adds is separate from the transcription, never mixed into it, and carries its own sources rather than borrowing the card’s.
A citation only appears on this site once a person has opened the source and confirmed it supports what it is attached to. Unverified references are held outside the site entirely rather than shown with a caveat — a half-shown citation still borrows the credibility of a real one.
42 of the 45 plants now carry independent references, checked that way, under “Sources” on their page, along with a note on how strong the evidence behind that card actually is. They cite the plant as a whole rather than any one section, so a section of a card is still transcription unless it says otherwise.
The remaining three cite only the deck: two are held while their printed backs are being checked, and one is a card whose back belongs to another plant entirely. References will appear on them as that work is done, not before.
Plantdex is an educational product. It does not diagnose, treat, or prescribe, and nothing on this site is a substitute for professional medical advice.