Alan Johnson spent a Saturday in February at the Greater Greenville Master Gardeners Symposium held at the Greenville Convention Center, introducing some new technology to an age-old pursuit.
Johnson, who is based in Greenville, and business partner Michael Watson of Portland, Oregon, in December launched Known as a new way to identify garden, house and farm plants while helping gardeners keep track and care for them.
With Known, Johnson, a software engineer and developer, has created a line of “semismart” digital plant markers, small plastic markers that can take the place of handwritten labels attached to stakes that can fade or be ruined by weather and time.
The idea was born in Johnson’s backyard in Greenville.
As a novice gardener, Johnson learned all he could about his plants and created labels for them only to watch them deteriorate and become illegible after one season.
“First, I have terrible handwriting, so that’s not great for a label,” he said. “Then, you’re restrained by the space of it, so I started having ideas of what could be a technological or software solution.”
How Known works
The plastic markers work in much the same way as smartphone apps like Apple Pay or Google Pay, but instead of transferring money, the user can access, record and send information about plants to and from the Known database.
“It’s a completely sealed device. There are no batteries,” Johnson said. “People generally (of) almost all ages at this point are using smartphones, and a lot of people are using payments, and it works the same way.”
With a tap of a smart device, gardeners can enter complete information about their plants, including care instructions, locations, scientific names and any other pertinent data.
“At the end of the day, you just tap your phone and then follow the prompts,” Johnson said.
The company launched in December as Leafy, but rebranded as Known with the website knownplants.com to end confusion with other “leafy” entries in a crowded plant and garden market. Known also introduced its indoor plant line of markers in February to go with its larger, sturdier outdoor markers.
As gardening season approaches, Johnson said he is working to get the Known name and the products into the market in time for planting and labeling.
“To go from scratch to setting up a physical product has been really interesting because that’s not something I’ve done in the past,” Johnson said. “There’s been a lot of learning and figuring out the plastics we needed to use for it and figuring out packaging and a lot of other things.”
