A person sitting in a lush garden at dusk, at ease among the planting
Living intelligence for gardens & homes

Your environment has a voice.

Tendril weaves sensing, water intelligence, and conversational AI into the living fabric of your garden and home — hardware that disappears into branches and beds, and an environment that can finally tell you about its day.

The idea

Technology that belongs outdoors — because it was designed to live there.

Most smart-home gear is a plastic box shouting for attention. Tendril takes the opposite vow: our instruments are shaped like the world they serve. A sensing vine wrapped along a fence line. A watchful coil resting on a branch. Moisture eyes sleeping under the mulch. They listen to soil chemistry, air, water, wingbeats, and weather — and they answer to you, in plain speech, wherever you happen to be standing. Not technology instead of nature. Technology in service of it.

Concept art: a sensor instrument shaped like a serpent-vine, coiled on a mossy oak branch
Sensorium concept — an instrument grown, not manufactured.
Three systems, one organism

What we grow into your place.

💧

H2OS

The water operating system

Cisterns, catchment, and irrigation with a nervous system. Every tank level, every valve, every zone — visible and controllable from your pocket, or by simply asking.

  • Rain capture & cistern telemetry, live
  • Tap to water, tap to drain, zone by zone
  • Irrigation that learns each bed's real thirst
  • Greywater & drought-mode orchestration
Field-proven — running in client gardens today
🌿

The Sensorium

Naturalistic sensing hardware

Instruments camouflaged as the garden itself, reading what no dashboard ever showed you.

  • Soil & air chemistry — new compounds flagged early
  • Visitor log: birds, pollinators, night mammals
  • Invasive species & pest pressure alerts
  • Plant-stress detection before leaves show it
  • Pollen & biological-irritant tracking
🗣️

Presence

The ambient voice layer

The whole property knows where you are — so wherever you walk, inside or out, your environment focuses on you and simply listens.

  • Speak from anywhere; no screens, no summoning ritual
  • The garden reports its day like a naturalist
  • Create out loud — notes, ideas, questions — mid-stroll
  • Answers grounded in your land's live data
Rain arriving, measured stone by stone.
The voice

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

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; net migration into the yard, which the salvia is loving.
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 sitting 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. You should come see it while the light's still low.

A composite of live H2OS telemetry, Sensorium observation, and the Presence voice layer.

Design principles

Rules we won't break.

Disappear into the place

If you can spot the device, we failed. Every instrument is shaped, colored, and sited to read as part of the landscape — vine, stone, bark, mulch.

Creatures, not gadgets

Our hardware has the quiet character of garden fauna — a coil on a branch, a runner along a fence. Things you grow fond of, not things you configure.

Speak like a naturalist

No dashboards screaming numbers. Your environment reports the way a good field biologist would — what changed, what matters, what it needs.

Serve the living, not the ledger

We build to deepen your relationship with the place you live — healthier soil, wiser water, more life per square foot. Your land's data belongs to you, and to no one else.

The vision — the H2OS mesh

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

Every H2OS installation is a listening post — soil moisture, cistern levels, rainfall, temperature, life. Now imagine your whole neighborhood connected. The gardens begin to compare notes, and something new becomes visible: the environment starts speaking in sentences instead of words.

🌧️

Weather, measured — not forecast

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

🗺️

A living map of the ground

Soil moisture block by block. Frost pooling in the low streets. The water table's slow seasons. Bloom and pollinator waves rolling through the neighborhood like weather of their own.

🐝

Early word, shared

An invasive beetle's front line, moving two streets a week. A dry spell the whole block can budget water for together. What one garden notices, every garden learns.

This is the wonder we're building toward — an environment that doesn't just answer, but converses with itself, and lets us listen in.

A neighborhood, dreaming together.
Packages & installation

Arrives as a kit. Installed like a garden.

Lighting, cameras, sensors, water hardware — curated into packages that fit your place, and planted by installers who work like gardeners, not electricians. Every install is tuned to the site: where the light should fall, where the wildlife moves, where the water wants to go.

🌱

Seedling

Start with water

H2OS on your existing irrigation and tanks, plus first soil-moisture eyes. The garden starts reporting within a day.

🌾

Meadow

Sense the whole yard

Adds the Sensorium — naturalistic cameras, wildlife and chemistry sensing, and lighting that blends into the planting.

🌳

Canopy

Full presence

The complete organism, indoors and out: ambient voice everywhere you walk, whole-property awareness, one living system.

The product line we're building toward — installed and maintained by Tendril-certified contractor partners, assembled with allies who build the way we do.

Pilots in the ground

Proof, growing in real places.

Tendril isn't a rendering. These are live installations where the systems on this page are already listening, watering, and speaking. Two of them are open to visit.

The garden that runs itself

Residential · Meadow package

A half-acre hillside garden in Altadena, wired end to end with H2OS and a first Sensorium ring. It waters four zones on its own read of the soil, logs every visitor from bees to the resident scrub-jay, and files a spoken morning report to the owner's phone before coffee. Nine months in, it has cut irrigation draw by a third and caught two plant-stress events before a leaf ever showed it.

● Running since winter 2025

A room that breathes with the workout

Commercial · Presence pilot

An indoor movement gym in Culver City, fitted with a Presence layer that reads the room and answers it in light and sound. Warm-up dims to a low amber hush; a heavy set lifts the room into cool, bright focus; the cooldown lets the light go long and gold as the playlist settles. The coaches steer none of it by hand — they just ask the room, out loud, and it follows.

In build · opens spring 2026
Where we start — Tendril Studio

Today, we consult. The mesh is what we're building toward.

Tendril begins as a consultancy, not a factory. We help people and organizations grow AI into their environments — automation that serves the people in the room and the world outside the window. We design AI development environments, build the automations, and train your team to tend them: internal workflows, customer-facing experiences, and physical spaces that listen the way our gardens will. Every engagement sharpens the capabilities the mesh needs — and funds the road there.

Roots

Grown from three decades of water-wise garden craft.

Tendril begins where California's water-wise garden movement meets modern AI. Our founding practice has spent thirty years designing native, drought-resilient landscapes — rain capture, dry creek beds, bioswales, habitat planting — and H2OS was born in those working gardens, controlling real cisterns for real clients. The intelligence is new. The care is not.

A garden already speaks — in leaf color, birdsong, and the smell of rain on granite. We're just teaching it your language.
The invitation

Right now, this is an idea.
Ideas need allies.

We're not pretending to be a factory — we're a direction, a working water practice, and a set of AI capabilities looking for the rest of the organism. If you're a landscape craftsperson, a sensor engineer, an ecologist, an AI builder, or someone with a garden and the itch to go first — we want to compare notes. Bring a capability. We'll bring the direction.