Tucked between the blooms and bees of an urban garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, something unusual is happening – the trees are talking. Not metaphorically, but in code. With sensors embedded in their bark and artificial intelligence translating their responses, these plants can now hold conversations with curious gardeners. “You can actually click […]
Tucked between the blooms and bees of an urban garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, something unusual is happening – the trees are talking. Not metaphorically, but in code. With sensors embedded in their bark and artificial intelligence translating their responses, these plants can now hold conversations with curious gardeners.
“You can actually click and talk to the individual trees,” says Devon Young, user experience design manager for Avanade. “You can ask it, ‘Should I water you today?’ and it’ll respond based on real-time environmental data.”
What are we talking about? While it might sound like Groot from Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is coming to life, it is a new web app that will allow users to talk to trees based on Avanade’s sensor technology, sitting amongst their digital twin of an Intelligent Garden.
The aim behind the innovative technology is significant: To cultivate not just better gardens, but more sustainable ones at a more accessible rate.
Listening to the leaves at Chelsea Flower Show
The app, ‘Tree Talk’, is powered by GPT-4 Mini, a scaled-down version of ChatGPT that’s been tightly confined to its garden domain.
Asking it about sport or politics won’t get you very far: “I don’t know, I’m just a tree”, it may respond. But, prompted with “When will you blossom?” it offers answers drawn from a live stream of sensor data and expert botanical input.
“We’re not trying to replace gardeners,” Young explains. “What we’re trying to do is make more sustainable decisions about how we garden, and how we tend to our garden, so we can better look after it for longer.”
Each tree is fitted with multiple sensors, some in the soil, others in the trunk or canopy, which monitor everything from tilt to temperature.
A sensor is embedded in the bark
“If the trees aren’t growing or expanding as expected, we take that raw data and combine it with Tom’s expert knowledge to provide advice,” explains Steve Smith, group manager at Avanade, referring to Tom Massey, the landscape designer and project partner.
Pollinating powers
Just across from the trees, autonomous pollinator counters are underway.
In other words, a camera set inside a wooden bird house, looking out at the flowers, counting the insect visits in real time.
A camera set inside a bird box counts the insects
It uses computer vision to estimate which pollinators are landing and when.
“It might say, for example, there’s a 57% chance that it captured a bee and whether it landed or not,” says Peter Gallagher, solution architect manager at Avanade. “That lets us track actual visits rather than just fly-bys, which is important. Just because a bee flies past doesn’t mean it is pollinating.”
The aim is to create a low-maintenance, data-rich snapshot of pollinator health – a proxy for the vitality of the garden and an identifier of bee population.
A network of green intentions
The sensors transmit data using LoRaWAN, a low-power, wide-area networking protocol designed for connected objects.
At the show, all the sensors relay data to the device, which then sends it to Azure cloud, where it is processed. This includes any AI processing, which is all done in the cloud at present, though the team says it is already planning for a more distributed future.
“We plan to move some of it into the devices themselves, so that you can walk up to a tree and talk to it, and the AI is local,” he says. “That makes it easy to manage, especially in large forestry sites. You just stick the sensors on, it’s cheap to run, and it won’t fail.”
The aspiration is that even smallholders, schools or amateur gardeners could one day manage their plants with the help of this technology.
A greener codebase
Keeping green was in mind from the start. “We looked at everything we could reuse and repurpose,” Smith says. “Even the sensors are printed with 20% recycled materials.”
Running GPT-4 Mini, the AI system behind the trees, is part of that commitment. “It’s not doing a lot of generative AI. It just looks at the data we give it, uses the glossary of terms we’ve written, and wraps it up in natural language with a tone,” Young adds. “It’s not going out to the internet or being trained for months.”
Alongside the chatbot, visitors to the Chelsea Flower show – which has been held in London for more than a century – can go into the garden pavilion and be met with three screens presenting a digital twin of the garden.
“You can go in, sit down, and see what actions you need to take at a glance to better look after your garden,” Smith says.
With each tree colour coded green for good, yellow for medium, and red for needing attention, it shows what a technology-savvy garden could look like for the user.
If the concept catches on, the team envisions it being used in nurseries, public parks, and large-scale developments.
