Plant care

A grid of care cards — one card per plant, each answering the four questions a customer asks before they buy: how much sun, how much water, what soil, and will it survive my winter?

• You write the answers yourself, in your own words. There's no plant database and no app — a card is just a name, four short lines, and a note.
• The hardiness zone you enter shows twice: as a chip beside the plant's name, and again in the Hardiness row.
• The cards reflow on their own — three across on a wide screen, one on a phone.

Try it

Pick a preset to see its style, edit the heading, and change the Plant panel — the plant's name, its sun / water / soil lines, its zone, and its care notes all drive the first card in the preview. Try the Seasonal tint too: on Talamh it washes the section in the colour of the season. Use the screen-size and light/dark buttons in the preview header to check a phone and dark mode. The example below is the Talamh (garden) preset, where the card becomes a cross-section of earth.

←Plant care

Color scheme

Heading

Seasonal tint

Auto (no tint)Spring (green)Summer (gold)Autumn (amber)Winter (blue)

related_article_handle — unsupported in docs panel (article)

←Plant

Plant name

Sun requirement

Water requirement

Soil type

Hardiness zone

USDA / RHS plant hardiness zone (1-13). E.g. 5 for Z5.

Care notes

Sow under glass from March. Pinch out side shoots weekly and feed once the first truss sets.

Storefront preview

How to grow our heritage seed

• Tomato 'Sungold'

  Zone 5

  • SunFull sun
  • WaterRegular, deep
  • SoilWell-drained, rich
  • HardinessZone 5

  Sow under glass from March. Pinch out side shoots weekly and feed once the first truss sets.

• Lavender 'Hidcote'

  Zone 6

  • SunFull sun
  • WaterLow, drought-tolerant
  • SoilFree-draining, alkaline
  • HardinessZone 6

  Cut back by a third after flowering — never into old wood. Grit the planting hole on heavy clay.

• Hosta 'Halcyon'

  Zone 4

  • SunPartial to full shade
  • WaterEven moisture
  • SoilRich, moisture-retentive
  • HardinessZone 4

  Mulch in spring and keep the crown clear. A copper ring is the kindest slug defence.

How it works

Add the Plant care section to any page — a dedicated care guide, a collection page, a product page — then add one Plant block per plant. Each block is a name, four short answers, and an optional note; the section lays them out as cards and does the rest.

There is nothing to connect and nothing to sync. If you have no blocks yet, the theme editor shows a quiet "Add your first plant" prompt (only you see it — a shopper never does) and the live page simply renders nothing.

Composition

   Section heading
   Read more →

╔═══ soil-strata band (Talamh) ═╗  ╔═══════════════════════════════╗
│ Tomato 'Sungold'      [Zone 5]│  │ Lavender 'Hidcote'    [Zone 6]│
│ ───────────────────────────── │  │ ───────────────────────────── │
│ (icon) SUN        Full sun    │  │ (icon) SUN        Full sun    │
│ ───────────────────────────── │  │ ───────────────────────────── │
│ (icon) WATER      Regular     │  │ (icon) WATER      Low         │
│ ───────────────────────────── │  │ ───────────────────────────── │
│ (icon) SOIL       Well-drained│  │ (icon) SOIL       Free-drainng│
│ ───────────────────────────── │  │ ───────────────────────────── │
│ (icon) HARDINESS  Zone 5      │  │ (icon) HARDINESS  Zone 6      │
│                               │  │                               │
│ Sow under glass from March.   │  │ Cut back by a third after     │
│ Pinch out side shoots weekly. │  │ flowering — never old wood.   │
└───────────────────────────────┘  └───────────────────────────────┘

Each (icon) above is a real drawn mark the theme renders — a sun, water droplets, a sprout, a thermometer. Cards fill the row and wrap: roughly three across on a desktop, two on a tablet, one on a phone, with no columns setting to get wrong. A row only ever holds cards that fit; nothing is ever squeezed to a sliver. The hairline rules between the rows and the band across the top are the Talamh decoration; on the other presets the same rows sit on a plain card.

Section settings

Setting	What it does
Color scheme	Colours the whole section — background, text, cards, and links — from one scheme, so contrast stays legible in light and dark mode.
Heading	The section title (e.g. "How to grow our heritage seed", "Care & planting"). Leave it blank to hide it.
Seasonal tint	Washes the section background in the colour of a season — Auto (no tint), Spring (green), Summer (gold), Autumn (amber), or Winter (blue). A gentle gradient, nothing more: it never changes prices, stock, or what the cards say. It is part of the Talamh preset's earth styling, so the other four presets leave the background as the colour scheme painted it.
Metafield namespace	Advanced. Names the metafield namespace this section publishes to the page (default uisce_talamh), so a developer's product-page blocks can read the same plant data. Leave it alone unless a developer tells you otherwise — the cards themselves read your block fields, not metafields.
Related article	Optional. Pick a blog post to link under the heading — it renders as a "Read more" link. Clear the selection to hide the link.

Plant settings (one per block)

Setting	What it does
Plant name	The card title (e.g. "Tomato 'Sungold'", "Lavender 'Hidcote'"). Write it the way your label writes it — cultivar name and all.
Sun requirement	Free text (e.g. "Full sun", "Partial to full shade", "Bright, indirect"). Shown against a sun icon. Leave blank to drop the row.
Water requirement	Free text (e.g. "Regular, deep", "Low, drought-tolerant", "Even moisture"). Shown against a water-droplet icon. Leave blank to drop the row.
Soil type	Free text (e.g. "Well-drained, rich", "Free-draining, alkaline", "Rich, moisture-retentive"). Shown against a sprout icon. Leave blank to drop the row.
Hardiness zone	The zone number — 5, 6, H4. It appears twice: as the chip beside the plant's name and in the Hardiness row, both written as "Zone 5". Leave blank and both disappear.
Care notes	A sentence or two of real advice ("Cut back by a third after flowering — never into old wood"). This is a rich-text field, so bold, italics, and links all work. Leave blank to hide it.

Every field is optional: a card with only sun and water shows only those two rows, cleanly. Fill in what you actually know, and leave the rest out rather than writing "N/A".

The Talamh signature — a cross-section of earth

Every preset gets the same working cards; Talamh (garden) gives them the earth treatment, and it's the preset this section was built for.

The card becomes a slice of ground. A warm-loam surface, rimmed in hairline terracotta. Along the top edge runs a decorative two-tone soil-strata band — moss-green topsoil over terracotta subsoil, the same cross-section stripe that draws under the header navigation. The Sun / Water / Soil / Hardiness rows stack as horizon rows, divided by hairline rules, so the care data literally reads as layered ground. The hardiness zone is a squared golden-harvest earth tile — grounded, deliberately not a rounded pill — and the care notes sit at the base of the horizon in an italic hand, like a field note pencilled in the margin. Nothing about the card's content or structure changes: the decoration sits on top of the same markup, the same icons, and the same reading order.

Preset	Treatment
Talamh	The signature soil-horizon card — a warm-loam surface, a hairline terracotta rim, the two-tone soil-strata band along the top edge, horizon rows split by hairline rules, a squared golden-harvest zone tile, and italic field-note care notes. It also carries the seasonal tint.
Uisce	Clean, calm cards on a cool ground.
Gaoth	Warm, rounded cards for pet and lifestyle stores.
Tine	Sharper, industrial cards for trade and hardware.
Neart	Soft, premium cards for calm wellness stores.

The section is available in every preset — and it isn't only for plants. It's a spec card grid: four labelled attributes, a chip, and a note. A tool shop can run it as "Voltage / Torque / Weight / Warranty"; a wellness brand as "Dose / Timing / With food / Storage". The labels on the four rows (Sun, Water, Soil, Hardiness) are fixed, though, so if the words don't fit your products the Comparison table is the better section. The earth decoration is the Talamh flavour, not a requirement.

Realistic examples

• A heritage-seed grower (the Talamh demo). Heading: "How to grow what you sow". Six cards — Tomato 'San Marzano', Pea 'Sugar Snap', Carrot 'Rainbow Mix', Lettuce 'Little Gem', Basil 'Genovese', and Radish 'French Breakfast' — each with its sun, water, soil, and zone lines filled in. Related article: soil-preparation-by-season, so the "Read more" link drops the shopper into the soil guide. It lives at /pages/plant-care.
• A houseplant shop. Four cards on the collection page — "Bright, indirect", "Let the top 2 cm dry out", "Free-draining, peat-free", zone left blank because nothing goes outdoors. Blank zone, no chip, no Hardiness row — the card is simply three rows.
• A bare-root tree specialist. One card per rootstock, with the zone doing the heavy lifting and a care note about the first winter's staking.
• A single plant's product page. One block, one card, dropped under the product description as a spec panel.

Responsive & accessibility

• Semantic cards. Each plant is a real <article> with the plant name as a heading, so a screen-reader user can jump plant to plant instead of wading through the whole grid.
• The zone chip reads properly. It shows the short "Zone 5", but it carries the full label "Hardiness zone 5" for screen readers, so the number is never announced without its meaning.
• The icons are decoration, not content. Every icon is hidden from screen readers and paired with a visible text label ("Sun", "Water", "Soil", "Hardiness") — nobody has to interpret a picture.
• No columns setting to get wrong. The grid fills the row with as many cards as fit at a comfortable width and wraps the rest, so it is correct on every screen without you configuring anything.
• Respects reduced motion — the card's hover shadow transition is switched off for shoppers who ask for reduced motion. The cards work exactly the same.
• Right-to-left ready — the cards, the zone chip, the icon rows, and the read-more link all flow correctly in Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Urdu.
• One color scheme — the whole section is painted from a single scheme, so text never lands in a low-contrast surprise, in light or dark mode. On Talamh the cards stay opaque in dark mode, so they never dissolve into the background.
• Every fixed string is translated — "Sun", "Water", "Soil", "Hardiness", "Zone 5", the chip's screen-reader label, and the "Read more" link all ship in all 50 locales. Your own words (the heading, the plant names, your four answers, the care notes) are your content: translate those under Apps → Translate & Adapt.
• App blocks are supported — an app can add its own block to this section (a care-reminder signup, a plant-identifier widget), and it renders beneath the cards.

Tips

• Write like a label, not like a manual. "Full sun", "Regular, deep", "Well-drained, rich" — three or four words per row. The card is a glance, the care notes are the sentence.
• Leave a field blank rather than writing "N/A". A blank field removes its row; "N/A" just makes the card look unfinished.
• Use the zone consistently. Pick USDA numbers (5) or the RHS scale (H4) and stick to one across every card, so the chips are comparable.
• Point the related article at a published post. If the chosen post is unpublished or deleted, the theme renders no link at all (rather than a broken one) — so if your "Read more" link is missing, check that the post is still published.
• Give it its own page. In the Talamh demo it's a page of its own (/pages/plant-care), linked from the main menu — customers bookmark it and come back to it long after the sale.
• Don't touch Metafield namespace unless a developer has asked you to. It's plumbing, not content.