Why this site exists
I have worked with horticultural plants in Kyoto since 1997, mainly in plant care and retail. Over the years, conversations with customers and visitors from overseas made me notice how differently familiar plants can behave under Kyoto’s climate and everyday growing conditions.
I sell plants locally in Kyoto, but Kyoto Horticultural Base is not an online shop. The site grew from a practical question: how can I explain plant care clearly to people whose language, climate, and growing experience may be very different from mine?
People from overseas often bring with them a sense of what is normal for growing plants — how much sun is typical, how hot summer feels, how cold winter becomes, or how often a plant needs water. In Kyoto, those assumptions may not always match the local conditions.
I was already measuring temperature, humidity, and light for my own horticultural work and for a Japanese gardening website. Kyoto Horticultural Base grew from the idea that these local measurements could also help people from overseas see and compare Kyoto’s growing environment, and discuss those differences with AI.
One observation point in Fushimi
The measurements on this site come from sensors at my horticultural facility in Fushimi, Kyoto. They are local observations from one place and should not be treated as official climate data for Kyoto as a whole, measurements from your own garden, balcony, or room, or fixed limits for where a plant can or cannot grow. Local conditions may also vary with buildings, direction, shade, wind, pavement, elevation, and the exact place where a plant is growing.
How the measurements are collected
The monitoring system is self-built and uses Raspberry Pi computers with environmental sensors. The system records environmental conditions automatically and prepares the measurements for publication on this website.
The current system includes:
FS-304Air temperature and relative humidity.
Apogee SQ-520Photosynthetic Photon Flux Density (PPFD), used for light measurements and Daily Light Integral (DLI) calculations.
Measurements, AI, and conversation
AI is used on this site as a tool for exploration, not as a replacement for observation. On the Climate & AI page, you can choose a day or period, copy the graph and prepared prompt, and paste them into the AI you already use. The measurements give the conversation a real environmental reference, while your own observations — the plant, its location, watering, light, symptoms, and recent changes — add the context that the sensors cannot provide.
Historical measurements can also be useful when thinking about the future. They are not a weather forecast, but they can be used conditionally. For example, you might ask: “If this winter is similar to last winter, what should I pay attention to when growing this plant?” or “If this summer develops under similar conditions, what risks might be worth watching?” In this way, older measurements can provide practical ideas for future growing decisions without treating the past as a prediction.
AI can then help you compare possibilities, ask follow-up questions, and think through the situation step by step.
A small independent site
Kyoto Horticultural Base is a personal project that I run on my own, separately from my main horticultural work. It is not operated by a university, government agency, or research institution. The monitoring system, website, and published explanations are all maintained as part of this independent project.
AI is used where it helps make the work practical, including translation, organizing multilingual visitor comments, and preparing explanations, while the original measurements and the limits of what they can show are kept separate from interpretation. Kyoto Horticultural Base also draws on selected ideas and features from a larger Japanese-language gardening site that I run separately. That site goes more deeply into horticultural practice, plant environments, gardening culture, and questions that do not fit the usual “how to grow” format. It is written in Japanese, but if you are interested, you can explore it here: 園芸秘密基地 / hortsb.com →
Time is limited, especially during the busy seasons, but if Kyoto Horticultural Base is well received, I hope to keep developing the English site during quieter periods, just as I have gradually built up the Japanese site.