Their problems they mention seem to be quite standard for image recognition (scale- and perspective variance), however I could imagine that this could be quite disastrous for plant recognition, given the massive diversity of plants: e.g. a leaf viewed from the side could equally well be a more narrow leaf from a different species.
As they write on [1]: "Our challenge comes from adapting our image recognition platform to recognize different shapes and sizes of the same plants, flowers and trees. We know this is possible, and we are close to cracking it."
[1] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/plantsnap-identify-plants...