Wall guide

Prompting Nature: Plants and Biomes

Biome words build the stage. Plant words dress the front of it. Together they give a scene real geography.

Free Midjourney Stable Diffusion 3 min read

How the model reads nature words

Nature words work at two scales. A biome word like Siberian taiga sets the whole frame: the tree line, the light, the ground, the weather that belongs there. A species word like saguaro cactus places one shape in the foreground. Most scenes want one of each.

Named places carry more than geography. Amazon rainforest brings humidity and green shade. Sahara desert brings a color palette before you name one. The model has seen these places photographed thousands of ways, so the name alone steers light and texture.

Species names beat category names for the same reason garment names beat clothing. Wildflowers is a vote; black-eyed Susan and Queen Anne's lace are a meadow you can almost date and locate.

How to pick from the wall

Start with the biome. It answers most questions at once: terrain, sky, palette. Then pick one or two plants that grow there and put them close to the camera. A scene with a stage and a foreground reads as a place; a list of plants reads as a catalog.

Keep the pairing honest unless the clash is the point. Water lily in the Mojave desert is surrealism; fine, but choose it. The wall's plant categories name their habitat so the honest pairs are easy to find.

Season and hour come from the weather wall. Cherry blossom tree plus early spring agree with each other; the model rewards the agreement with coherence.

Category walkthrough

Trees. Use banyan tree, birch tree, Joshua tree, and cherry blossom tree as the single strongest vertical in a landscape. One named tree can carry a whole composition.

Flowers and meadows. Use bird of paradise, coneflower, lavender, and sunflower for color at ground level. Meadow words fill wide foregrounds without asking for detail the model can't hold.

Desert and alpine. Use prickly pear, ocotillo, edelweiss, and moss campion for hard-climate scenes. These plants signal altitude and aridity on sight.

Aquatic and wetland. Use lotus, cattail, mangrove, and yellow iris where water meets land. Mangroves in particular build their own ecosystem in frame.

Carnivorous and strange. Use venus flytrap, pitcher plant, and cobra lily when the scene should feel slightly wrong. They read as fantasy while staying real.

Biomes. Use African savanna, arctic tundra, Everglades, Great Barrier Reef, and Himalayas to set the stage in one term. Named biomes also settle the palette argument before it starts.

Worked prompts

understorymacro photography of a trillium on the forest floor, North American deciduous forest, dappled light, shallow depth of field, morning mist
desert duska lone Joshua tree in the Mojave desert at dusk, ocotillo silhouettes, gouache, dusty pink sky --ar 3:2
wetlandherons wading past cattails and yellow iris in the Everglades, golden hour, telephoto lens, still water reflections
alpineedelweiss and moss campion on a rocky ledge, Himalayan alpine meadow, midday sun, deep depth of field, watercolor

Published here first.