Warren County, Tennessee has more than 400 nurseries in it. They call the place the Nursery Capital of the World, and the name is earned. I grew up in Rock Island, right in the middle of it.
Those growers publish availability lists. So do growers in Oregon, Michigan, North Carolina, and Florida. Each list has its own format, its own column layout, its own way of writing a size, its own habit for naming plants. One arrives as a spreadsheet with merged cells. One is a fourteen page PDF. One is a photograph of a printed sheet with quantities corrected by hand in the margin.
None of those growers is doing anything wrong. Their lists work perfectly well for their own operations and for the customers who have learned to read them. The formats grew out of real production systems and real history, and they are not going to change.
Somebody at a landscape firm, usually the person who knows plants best, spends hours a week translating those lists into a shape where the information becomes usable. Only then can anyone answer a question as simple as who has this maple and what does it cost.
Every list is the same language
For a long time I saw this the way the industry sees it. Every grower with their own format, and no fix short of asking hundreds of independent businesses to agree on something they have no reason to agree on.
Then I read fifty of them, over and over, and the same words kept surfacing under the formatting. Acer rubrum. 'Franksred'. Two inch caliper. Three gallon. Every grower writing the same vocabulary in their own shorthand.
Latin binomials. Cultivar names in single quotes. Caliper inches, container sizes, heights in feet. Trade names attached to registered cultivars attached to patent numbers. That vocabulary has been standardized for a century.
So we built it
Nurlogix reads any grower's availability list, in whatever format it arrives, and translates it into one private catalog you can actually search. Trade names resolve to cultivars where a cultivar exists. Abbreviations expand. Caliper notation normalizes so that two inch and 2.00 inch caliper WB stop being different products. Prices from every one of your suppliers line up next to each other on the same plant at the same size.
Your lists build your catalog and nothing else. We do not pool pricing across customers or share it with other users.
What we are building next
Availability lists are the supply side talking. The demand side has its own dialect.
A plant takeoff is the list a buyer builds off the plans, the plants they need quoted. Its own format, its own naming habits, its own abbreviations, and no two firms write one the same way. Then the buyer checks that list line by line against a stack of grower lists, usually at night, usually the night before the bid is due.
Translate the takeoff and translate the lists, and the two can be matched directly. What I need. Who has it. At what price. As of this week.
Who is behind this
I am Luke Campbell, and I build Nurlogix with my wife April.
I built websites for nurseries years ago, so the industry is not new to me, but I am not a landscaper. What I have done for the last twenty years is data: managing it, moving it, and building the pipelines that translate one system's format into another's.
Those pipelines used to be brittle. You wrote rules for every format you had seen, and the next one broke them. AI changed that and brought a different problem with it. A model reading a plant list produces a plausible answer every time, including when it is wrong, and it will not always give you the same answer twice.
That is why Nurlogix is built the way it is. The AI reads, and what it produces gets checked against real botanical data and rules that behave the same way every time. What cannot be resolved gets flagged for a person. A catalog you bid from has to be right on Tuesday the same way it was right on Monday.
Nurlogix is early, and that is deliberate. We are talking with landscape firms now, running their lists through the system, reviewing the results ourselves, and asking what works, what does not, and what would make it worth paying for. What we hear from the people using it while it is early decides what gets built next.