About Phool

Phool is a free guide to the flowers of the world and to everything people make and do with them. It has pages on 602 flowers, 155 decorations and customs, and 299 gardens, markets and bloom sites in 162 countries so far, and 4,712 more are on the list to be written. Phool is the Hindi word for flower.

The aim is simple: anyone should be able to look up any flower and come away knowing what it looks like, where it grows, when it blooms, what people do with it and what it means to them.

How it is arranged

Flowers are filed by country and city, by colour, by kind of plant, by botanical family, by what they are used for and by faith tradition. Decorations cover garlands, wreaths, arrangements, flower carpets, parades, offerings and crafts. Places are botanical gardens, flower gardens, markets and bloom sites. Experiences are things to do with flowers in a named city, with the months to go. Traditions explain the customs, and national flowers lists each country's emblem.

What is live

In flower today is rebuilt every day from the calendar: which festivals and shows are on, which bloom seasons are at their peak, what is in flower north and south of the equator, and a flower of the day. New pages are written every day, the news wire is checked every few hours, and every page is re-read against its sources over time.

How a page is made

Names and facts come from Wikidata and Wikipedia. The text is written afresh with AI assistance from those sources only: the facts are kept, the wording is ours. Every page is then compared with its source article, and a page that repeats a run of the article's words is rewritten or held back. Each page names its source and links to it and to its licence. Photos come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences, each credited to its author. Further reading links are ones the source article itself cites from well-known publishers, plus the plant databases its Wikidata record points to. Anything that falls short waits for a person to review it.

What Phool is not

It is not a plant-care manual, a foraging guide or medical advice. Many garden flowers are poisonous. Where a page mentions a traditional remedy, it is reporting a custom, not recommending it. It is not a booking site: opening times, prices and bloom dates change, so check with the place before you travel.

Care

Flowers carry meaning, and the same flower can mean joy in one country and mourning in another. Phool reports each meaning where it belongs. Sacred use is described as those who keep the tradition would describe it. If a page about your tradition is wrong, write to us and we will fix it.

Who is behind it

Phool is published by ClearTrust, a company that measures traffic quality for the advertising industry. ClearTrust pays for Phool and keeps it free. Phool is part of the ClearTrust IVT-Free Publication Network. IVT stands for invalid traffic: visits from bots and other fakes, which the network's sites are screened for. Editorial decisions are not for sale: sponsored placements are always labelled.

Get in touch

To suggest a flower, correct a page or ask a question, write to phool@cleartrust.cc.