Concept art: a person resting on a bench in a garden at dusk
Garden + AI company · Los Angeles · early stage

Your environment has a voice.

Tendril is building quiet technology for gardens and homes: sensing that blends into the planting, water you can manage from your phone, and a voice that lets the place tell you about its day. We start from one system that already works.

Field-proven: H2OS water control, running in client gardens
Get the allies brief Hear the garden speak
Three systems

Water first. Then sensing. Then a voice.

Each one builds on the one before. The first already runs in client gardens. The other two are in design.

Concept art: rain filling a barrel cistern beside a stone path and a dry creek bed lined with native planting
Concept art
Field-proven

H2OS

The water operating system

Cisterns, rain catchment and irrigation, fitted with sensors and controlled from an app. It came out of thirty years of water-wise garden design, and it already runs real cisterns in client gardens.

Today
Sensors and control for cisterns, catchment and irrigation, in one app
Next
Watering tuned to each bed, and answers when you ask out loud

The Sensorium

In design

Sensing hardware that looks like part of the garden

Instruments shaped to read as vine, stone, bark or mulch. What we want them to notice: soil and air chemistry, birds, pollinators and night visitors, pests and invasive species, plant stress, pollen.

Presence

In design

A voice for the whole property

The place knows roughly where you are, so you can speak from anywhere, inside or out. Answers come from your own land's readings, told the way a naturalist would tell them.

Concept art: a sensor instrument shaped like a vine-wrapped serpent, coiled on a mossy branch
Sensorium concept art: an instrument made to rest on a branch.
Rules we build by
  1. Disappear into the place. If you can spot the device, we got it wrong.
  2. Make things people grow fond of. A coil on a branch, a runner along a fence.
  3. Speak like a naturalist. What changed, what matters, what it needs.
  4. Your land's data is yours. It stays with you and no one else.
The voice

Walk outside. Ask your garden how it's doing.

A garden already speaks in leaf color, birdsong, and the smell of rain on granite. We're teaching it your language.
Founding note
You
Morning. How was your night?
Your garden
A good one. Two new visitors: a raccoon came through the back hedge around 2 a.m., and a Cooper's hawk hunted from the oak at dawn. Bee traffic is up nine percent this week, and the salvia is loving it.
Your garden
One ask. The roses in the southwest corner are running dry. Soil moisture dipped under twenty percent overnight. Want me to give them four minutes from tank two? It's at 82% after Tuesday's rain.
You
Do it. Anything else?
Your garden
Watering now. Otherwise we're healthy. The buckwheat's first flush opened this morning. Come see it while the light's still low.

This conversation is an illustration of where we're headed. H2OS already reads the tanks and runs the watering. The wildlife log and the voice are still in design.

The long view · not built yet

One garden knows its day. A thousand gardens know the weather.

Each garden on H2OS keeps track of its own water. Connect a neighborhood of them, add the sensing we're designing, and the readings add up to things no single yard can see.

  • Weather, measured

    A rain front crossing town, recorded cistern by cistern. Your garden knows the storm is minutes away because the gardens uphill already felt it.

  • A map of the ground

    Soil moisture block by block. Frost pooling in the low streets. Bloom and pollinator waves moving through the neighborhood.

  • Early warning, shared

    An invasive beetle moving two streets a week. A dry spell the whole block can plan its water around. What one garden notices, every garden learns.
Where we are

Early stage, with one system already working.

Tendril grows out of a California garden design practice with thirty years of water-wise gardens behind it: native planting, rain capture, dry creek beds, bioswales, habitat. H2OS was built in those gardens, on real cisterns for real clients. The company itself is new, and its legal entity is not formed yet.

  1. Working today

    • H2OS: sensor control of cisterns, catchment and irrigation from an app, in client gardens.
    • Thirty years of water-wise garden design and build.
    • AI systems we run every day: voice agents, automation, research tools.

  2. In design

    • The Sensorium and Presence, as designs and concept art.
    • A first commercial pilot, at proposal stage: light and sound that follow the class in an indoor movement studio in Los Angeles. Nothing is built yet.

  3. Looking for

    • Landscape craftspeople who want their installs to keep learning
    • Sensor and hardware engineers
    • Ecologists and horticulturists
    • AI builders
    • Southern California gardens willing to go first
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Tendril Studio

While we build, we consult.

We help people and businesses put AI to work in their own spaces and workflows. We set up the AI working environment, build the automations, and train your team to run them. Consulting is how Tendril starts, and it's meant to pay for the rest.

Talk to the Studio
Join the allies list

Ideas need allies.

If you work with landscapes, sensors, ecology or AI, run a business that could use the Studio, or have a garden and want to go first, leave your email. The one-page allies brief opens right away.