How closeness and health work together
Grenier reads every relationship along three dimensions. Closeness is the circle you put someone in — Garden, Orchard, Pasture, or Hedgerow — and it answers “how close is this person to me?”. Health is the grain tier — Mature, Growing, or Fallow — and it answers “am I keeping up with them?”. Interests are the topics you’ve noted or that surface from your history, and they answer “what is there to talk about?”. This article is about how the first two combine.
The circle sets the keep-in-touch interval: Garden is your closest people at about 30 days, Orchard is regular contact at about 90 days, Pasture is occasional but real at about 180 days, and Hedgerow is rare or one-sided at about 365 days. You can adjust each interval in Settings, but those are the defaults.
Health is scored relative to that cadence rather than on a fixed calendar. The same 60-day silence reads very differently depending on the circle: it pushes a Garden contact to Fallow — you’re overdue against a 30-day target — but leaves a Pasture contact comfortably Mature, since 60 days is well inside a 180-day target. So health always means “relative to how often you said you’d stay in touch with this person.”
Reading the two together tells you whether to act or to rest. A Fallow tier is only a problem in proportion to closeness: Fallow nudge priority rises with closeness, so a Fallow Garden contact is your single most urgent reconnect, while a Fallow Hedgerow contact is exactly what a distant relationship is supposed to look like — leaving it resting is fine. Mature and Growing cells mostly mean “no action needed.”
The matrix below shows every combination of the four circles and three tiers, with what each cell means and the nudge it implies.
Matrix pairing the four closeness circles (Garden 30 days, Orchard 90 days, Pasture 180 days, Hedgerow 365 days) against three health tiers (Mature, Growing, Fallow). Each cell states what the combination means and whether to reconnect or let the relationship rest. Reconnect priority for an overdue (Fallow) contact rises with closeness: a Fallow Garden contact is the top reconnect, while a Fallow Hedgerow contact is fine left resting.
Closeness (the circle) sets the keep-in-touch interval; health is scored relative to that cadence.
| Circle | Mature | Growing | Fallow |
|---|---|---|---|
| Garden30 days | On cadence — keep it up | Warming nicely | Top reconnect — overdue & close |
| Orchard90 days | Healthy | Steady | Reconnect soon |
| Pasture180 days | Healthy | Resting fine | Light nudge |
| Hedgerow365 days | Healthy | Fine at rest | Let it rest |
Reconnect priority (overdue) rises with closeness. “Move closer” is a separate signal — contact frequency persistently tighter than the circle interval — not a health tier.
One more signal lives alongside this matrix but isn’t part of it: “move closer.” If you contact someone persistently more often than their circle’s interval — say you’re messaging a Pasture contact every few weeks — Grenier flags that the relationship may have outgrown its circle and suggests moving them closer. That’s a frequency signal about the circle, not a health tier, so it never appears as Mature, Growing, or Fallow.