A bonsai care app built on one idea — the care sheet belongs to the species, not to the pot. Eighty-five species guides, a diary that remembers, and a record that outlives you.
iPhone · iPad · Mac · Apple Vision Pro — coming to the App Store
床の間 · The alcove
In a traditional Japanese house the tokonoma is a shallow recessed alcove, framed by a lintel above and an unmilled pillar at its edge. It holds one considered thing at a time — a hanging scroll, a viewing stone, a tree — and it is changed as the season turns. Guests entering the room look at it first.
In formal bonsai display the alcove is where a tree earns its viewing: the bonsai, an accent plant, a scroll, sometimes a suiseki, arranged so that nothing competes. The refinement of the pillar tells you how formal the display intends to be.
Not an inventory of plants — the place your trees are kept properly and looked at closely.
The whole app, in one observation
One is fifty years old. One is a stripling. One is a forest of seven. They are three different trees — but they want the same water, the same light, the same cuts.
So the care sheet belongs to the species, not to the pot. Write how a wild olive wants to be pruned once, and all three olives read it. Change your mind and all three change with you. Every tree keeps its own photograph, its own name, its own history — and shares one guide.
One care sheet — Olea europaea — read by all three.
What it does
Maple, pine, juniper, ficus, olive, hornbeam, elm, pomegranate, mastic, jade and seventy-five more — each arriving with placement, watering, fertilizing, pruning, repotting and overwintering already written, plus temperature bands, soil pH, hardiness zone and native range. Edit any of it. Add your own.
Twenty kinds of milestone — collected, repotted, styled, wired, unwired, defoliated, first flower. The tree's history reads back as a timeline, and the app knows it is still wired because you never wrote that you took the wire off.
The app knows a double-flush pine is not a single-flush pine, and that a juniper never gets a flush cut. Small distinctions — but reversing one of them kills a tree.
Record trunk, nebari and height whenever you measure. The curve draws itself over the years, so a decade of thickening becomes something you can actually see.
Sixteen care aspects. Keep the ones you use, hide the ones you don't, order them the way you think. Set it once as your template — or differently for every single species.
Printable cards, six to a page, carrying only what you wrote — your trees, your history, your notes. Export everything as CSV or JSON, and bring it back in again.
Four times a year
At the turn of each season, one reminder to photograph your trees. It is the only notification this app sends — and it is off until you ask for it.
There is deliberately no watering schedule. Watering depends on today's weather, this soil and this pot, and no calendar can know them. But a year of photographs is the one record you cannot go back and make.
A pure app
There is no sign-in and no account, because there is no server to sign in to. Your trees live on your device and sync through your own private iCloud, managed by Apple, which the developer cannot read.
No analytics. No third-party code of any kind. Nothing is collected, because nothing is sent.
Two editions
The full app
Every tree you own, without limit — and every tool for keeping the record.
Free
The same app, the same species library, held to five plants.
In your language
Chosen on the first screen and changed whenever you like, without restarting the app. Classifications, styles, milestone kinds and every temperature and pH figure are translated and correctly formatted.
The seeded species notes are written in English — deliberately. Reversing one horticultural instruction kills a tree, so a guide is only translated when someone can verify it. Every one of them is yours to rewrite.
Support
Tokonoma is made by one independent developer. Write with a question, a bug, a species you want seeded, or a correction to a care sheet — corrections are especially welcome.
Questions about the app, a tree, or a care sheet that reads wrong.
support@tokonoma.app