There’s nothing new about talking to plants. People, including famous members of the British Royal Family, have been doing it for decades.
But the one way dialogue between humans and plants is about to become more of a conversation in the shape of the Chelsea Flower Show’s first intelligent garden powered by AI.
The Avanade Intelligent Garden will gather data from a series of sensors and feed it back to a central hub, where it will be interpreted with data and gardening know-how from the Royal Horticultural Society to give visitors the opportunity to ask the garden questions such as “How are you today?” or “Do you need a drink?”
“What we are doing is using the garden as proof of concept on how you can take the technology that’s already being used on large scale farming projects, and bring it to life in the cultivated garden,” reveals Avanade chief innovation & sustainability officer Annette Giardina.
Visitors will be able to explore this technology through an innovative pavilion made from sustainable mycelium panels and interact with the garden via a digital twin, a virtual model of the garden which is informed by real time data from the garden’s sensor array.
Powered by solar panels the system is an energy-efficient trained algorithmic AI, a small language model reading sensor data for which there is a predicted list of actions, so there is no need for the high energy demand of some GenAI systems.
Sensors will monitors factors such as soil moisture, pH, temperature, air quality, wind, and rainfall to help create a dynamic digital model of the garden, revealing trends, tracking changes, and predicting future conditions, enabling proactive, resource-efficient care, says Giardina.
She adds that Avanade, a Microsoft Accenture JV which is developing the Intelligent Garden in collaboration with Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI, aims to showcase how AI technology can be used to support the wider natural world – against the backdrop of the climate crisis.
“We are going to try and adapt the work we have done for other customers around species recognition to mount cameras in the garden to detect birds, bees and other insects.”
“It’s not easy as they are small and each one needs its own recognition software but it could enable gardeners and garden owners to find out a lot more about the species diversity in their own back yards.”
Irrigation is another obvious place where the coordination of easily measurable data could be used to improve current garden irrigation systems to be less wasteful, she says.
“Gardens have automatic sprinklers and watering systems, but if that sprinkler had a sensor on it that was using an Internet of Things (IOT)wireless connection back to a control centre, it could be switched off when water is not needed or activated when it is, saving precious water resources, which are only set to become more precious in future.”
Garden designer Tom Massey, a familiar face at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show who is reuniting with architect Je Ahn on the project, adds that “We are wasting so much water and London is at risk of running out of water in coming years. Imagine how much water you could save in a big development if you only use water when needed.”
Beyond the Intelligent Garden, the application of AI to horticulture could be much bigger, insists RHS director of IT Jon Simpson, who predicts that in future we will see the more widespread introduction of digital twins.
“Apps will be able to represent the plants in the garden, balcony or in your house, using IOT sensors and RHS knowledge to provide prompts and information to the gardener with requests and alerts from the plants to “water”, “feed” or “prune” me!”
“More generally AI will accelerate the RHS’s research into areas such as which plants that are best suited to changing environmental conditions, guiding gardeners and garden planners to plant cultivars that support carbon sequestration, increased shade for cooling effects and water retention,” says Simpson.
He stresses that the RHS has adapted its AI approach to be as energy efficient as possible. “You have to ask the question how much energy does it use, so what we are doing is training more traditional AI against the RHS database, using small language models, which are far more efficient and effective.”
The RHS Chatbotanist, an interactive AI powered tool developed last year with Publicis Sapient to answer gardening questions from plant ID to disease control, is a good example, says Simpson. “ChatBotanist uses a ‘small language GenAI model which uses a lot less energy than a large language model such as ChatGPT.
“We don’t need to trawl the entire internet for an answer, but instead draw from a specific data set – in this case the 200-plus years of RHS research and knowledge.”
Not everyone in the horticultural world is as enthusiastic about the coming of AI as garden designer Tom Massey and Avanade, as Massey discovered when he used his latest Chelsea design to start a discussion about AI in horticulture on Instagram.
Many professionals voiced concerns that AI would simply replace a gardener’s experience and expertise, something that people are prepared to pay for at the moment.
That won’t happen, insists the RHS. Avanade’s Giardina points out that all that AI does is sample data, analyse it and feed back possible actions rather than do any of the work.
“It should increase productivity, reduce overwatering, maybe make sure the right nutrients are available at the right time, and make the garden healthier, but you’ll still need a skilled gardener to come in and do the work,” she insists.
She adds: “ There was a co-pilot project involving garden design but we thought that would potentially be taking somebody’s job, so we didn’t take it any further.”
“AI will really help in situations such as council tree planting initiatives,” adds Giardina, which have a high loss rate of newly-planted trees partly because councils don’t have enough gardeners to water them. “But if you had a digital twin you could send the gardener’s just to the trees that were identified as needing help.”
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