Guild design program

This may already exist in some form. If so, if you could link me to it I'd greatly appreciate it!

I'm trying to make a Garden Guilder program that will help people try different combos of a guild to see how their attributes stack up and get a better vision of the whole design. 100% inspired by the data in Gaia's Garden from the great Toby Hemenway.

Before I create all of these entries though, I thought I might ask first:

Do you think this would even be useful?
Can you suggest any other data points that I'm missing that would be useful for guilding decisions?

From the book I get:

-Common Name
-Botanical Name
-Layer
-Hardiness Zone
--Tall-Tree
--Low-Tree
--Shrub
--Vine
--Ground Cover
--Root
--Herb
-Functions
--Air Purifier
--Animal Forage
--Nitrogen Fixer
--Soil Builder
--Pest Repellent
--etc...

I was thinking of adding:

-Plant Family
-Mature Height/Width
-Sun Requirements
-Years to Maturity

Any recommendations of useful additions would be greatly appreciated!

This is just a spare time project, but it will of course be free to use and accessible (If I can actually pull it off... ). Not trying to harvest your genius ideas for profit or something like that!

Thank you for any advice on this!

Hey Andy, this is a great idea! Myself and another permie are working on something similar at the moment. Currently you can only create guilds from a large database of plants, but we'll be working on more of the aspects soon too.

If it's an option for you, I'd love to see if we could collaborate on this! I'll send you a purple moosage with my email if you're interested!

I would definitely add the middle two.

The idea of a plant guild program is definitely appealing to me. I always feel a little lost when trying to plan my plantings. Best of luck with this project.

This is a great idea and certainly useful! Along with mature size and sun requirements, I'd suggest water requirements, bloom time, and growth habit. I always like to find out before I plant if something has a strong suckering or spreading habit so I can make sure everyone plays nice and I don't have to do a ton of work managing such things.

I would include climate. Maybe you use the PFAF database as the base of your program because you want as many plants in there as possible. They would maybe collaborate, it doesn't hurt to ask. I mean there are thousands and thousands of plants, it is difficult to evaluate all of them. You might want a club interface where lots of people can add plants.

You might look at glazy.org which has NOTHING to do with permies it is a pottery glaze recipe source. BUT it could give you some inspiration (the site is marvelous).

Midwest Permaculture Presents:Plant Guilds
By Bryce Ruddock
https://midwestpermaculture.com/eBook/Plant%20Guilds%20eBooklet%20-%20Midwest%20Permaculture.pdf