Terms of use

You may use London Garden for your own personal, non-commercial use. Please do not attempt to break, overload or reverse engineer the service, and do not use it to produce anything unlawful or abusive.

The app shows you where trees are on real streets with real traffic. You are responsible for your own safety while using it. The camera deliberately steps aside when it detects that you are walking, but that is a courtesy and not a substitute for paying attention to what is around you.

Tree records come from the Greater London Authority’s public realm trees dataset, published under the Open Government Licence. It is a count of the trees managed by public bodies, so it is neither complete nor perfectly accurate: positions can be out by a metre or two, species can be recorded loosely, and trees are felled and planted faster than any dataset is updated. Nothing in the app is professional advice about a tree, its health or its safety.

Replies are generated by a language model prompted with the tree’s public record. They are a piece of whimsy, not a source of fact, and a model can be confidently wrong. Do not rely on anything a tree tells you. We ask that you keep conversations civil; abusive use may end access.

Message packs are one-off purchases of a number of messages. They do not expire but they are not refundable once used, and they have no cash value. Open Garden is an auto-renewing subscription that continues until you cancel it, with fair use limits described at the point of purchase.

All payments are handled by Apple through the App Store. Apple takes the payment, issues the receipt and handles refunds under its own terms, so refund requests go to Apple rather than to us. Your legal rights as a consumer are not affected by anything in these terms.

Apple’s standard Licensed Application End User Licence Agreement applies to this app alongside these terms, and is at apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula.

You can photograph a tree that is already on the map. Every photograph is looked at by a person before anything happens to it; approved ones appear on that tree’s page in place of a stock picture of the species, and earn you ten messages with that tree. The messages are granted on approval and not on upload.

You keep the copyright. What you give us is permission: to show the photograph in the app and on this site on that tree’s page, and to resize and crop it to fit, which is all the editing it will get. We do not sell it, license it on to anybody else, or use it to advertise. The exact wording you agreed to is recorded with the photograph, along with its version, because that wording will change over time and your agreement is to the words that were in front of you.

By offering a photograph you are telling us it is yours to give, that it is of that tree, and that anyone recognisable in it does not mind. You can withdraw it at any time from your submissions and it comes off the page. Messages you have already earned stay yours: withdrawing a photograph is not something you get punished for. We may also take a photograph down ourselves, and will say why.

A photograph may carry a name if you give one. Use a first name or nothing; do not put an email address or anything else you would not want published, because a published page is public.

If you submit a tree that is missing from the record, you confirm that the photo is yours to share. That photo is evidence for the review and is not published: it is held privately, seen by the person who checks the submission, and nothing else. The tree itself appears on the map once approved. We review submissions by hand and may decline or remove any of them.

Offering a photograph of a tree already on the map is a separate thing, and that one is published on the tree’s page once approved. It has its own wording, shown at the moment you offer it, and you agree to it there rather than here.

We do our best to keep the service running but we do not promise that it will be uninterrupted or error free, and features may change as the app develops. We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss. Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction. Questions about them go to hello@ldn.garden.