Native Garden Planner

A full live demo of Native Garden Planner hosted with Big Blue Stem Farm. We design a pollinator patch from scratch, walk through the catalog, bloom calendar, export, and community features — then take a tour of a complex multi-bed residential design.

Transcript

Welcome & introductions

[0:02] Hello everyone and welcome to "A Faster Way to Design Native Gardens" with Native Garden Planner. Today I'm going to talk a little bit about the tool, how it came to be, and how it can help speed up your planning process. Then we're going to dive in and plan a small pollinator patch together.

A big thank you to Big Blue Stem Farm for putting this on — they're a fantastic resource for finding plants in the Illinois and Michigan areas, with great infographics and plant breakdowns. Their website is bigbluestemfarmmi.com.

[1:00] We have people here from Wild Ones, the Native Plants Guild, the Michigan Nursery and Landscape Association, and the Newaygo County Environmental Coalition. Great to have you all.

If you want to follow along and plan your own pollinator patch as we go, you're encouraged to do so — head to nativegardenplanner.com and sign up while I cover the intro. Otherwise, kick back and watch. Either way is great.

[2:06] Happy summer! My coneflowers just came in this past week. Drop your favorite plant of the year in the chat — mine is blue star, which finally bloomed for the first time and completely won me over.

About Native Garden Planner

[3:07] My name is Hannah and I'm the founder of Native Garden Planner. I'm a software engineer by trade — over 11 years in the field. I got into native plants a couple years ago while planning my own garden and quickly ran into a problem: there was no good tooling for it. I was compiling lists in Excel, Evernote, and scraps of paper, then trying to plot them on graph paper. Slow, hard to adjust, and no way to visualize how plants would look next to each other. So I built something.

[4:01] Native Garden Planner launched in January 2025. We're now at over 5,000 users as of July 2026.

At its core, it's a lightweight drag-and-drop garden builder with a native plant-only catalog. One place to go instead of juggling multiple systems. Filter the catalog for your conditions, toggle on a map layer to draw over your real property, group plants into lists, add notes. The idea is that it covers the whole planning process in one place.

[5:11] A few things it does especially well:

Rapid design iteration — swap plants in place, move things around, draw complex polygons to scale, fork or copy your design to test different versions.

Low entry, high ceiling — simple enough for a hobbyist, but it also has multi-layer support, maps and satellite view, custom imagery, custom plant libraries, advanced exports, garden templates and modules, and features built specifically for organizations and landscape design firms.

Built for native plants — the catalog is natives only, filtered by region. But it's also about the community. Feature requests, catalog contributions, public gardens, plant comments — everything I build is aimed at getting more plants in the ground.

[8:11] Someone sent me a photo of a garden they planned in the tool and then actually built. I thought that was really cool. Okay — enough intro. Let's build a garden.

Demo: Creating a pollinator patch

[8:54] I'm going to sign in and go to Create a Garden. You can start from a template if you want something to build on, or start from scratch. We're going from scratch — a simple pollinator patch, 8 feet long by 4 feet wide.

For growing conditions I'll enter Maryland, full sun, and dry soil. I'll skip the address since we're not covering maps today. Hit go.

[9:59] Here's the planner. On the left is the sidebar for managing your garden and adding plants. The main canvas is your workspace. On the right is the control panel for canvas-level actions — save a copy, share a link, take a screenshot, export.

[10:36] Let's jump straight into the catalog. Click the Browse icon in the sidebar — a plant with a plus sign. Since I set full sun and dry soil, those filters are already applied. I want to add one more: "good for pollinators." I'll also select straight native and perennial — I want this to be a flower patch.

[12:03] You can see the result count update as you apply filters. You can toggle between illustrations and real plant photos to see how combinations might look in the garden. I'll stay on illustrations for now.

I'm going to start with taller plants — filtering for two to eight feet — since I'll want something in the back row. Plant sizes show as a range; when placed on the canvas, the plant assumes its maximum mature size so you're planning for the end state.

[13:15] I'm going to start with blue star. I can click it to open the side panel — blooms April to June, clump-forming, available in Maryland — or just hover and hit "Add Plant" to go straight to stamp mode. Stamp mode turns your cursor into a scaled preview of the plant. Click to place it, click again to place another, press Escape to exit.

[14:39] Once a plant is on the canvas, click it to open a context menu. You can bring it forward, send it back, place more of the same, or swap it for a different plant. Let's say I placed two blue stars and want to swap one — I select it, click Swap, find Canada goldenrod in the catalog, and it replaces it in place.

[15:15] Notice the bloom calendar at the bottom of the canvas. Blue star blooms spring, goldenrod blooms fall — now I can see both represented. Let me add some summer coverage: bergamot. Three plants along the middle.

The bloom calendar now shows spring, summer, and fall coverage overlapping nicely. Click any month to highlight which plants are in bloom during that period.

[16:36] Now I want something smaller for the front row. I'll adjust the size filter down. Eastern red columbine or a smaller white-blooming plant — I'll add a couple for symmetry on either side.

Keyboard shortcuts: Control/Cmd+Minus to zoom out, Control/Cmd+Plus to zoom in. "Fit to view" button snaps back to show the whole garden. Control+C / Control+V to copy and paste plants.

[17:39] Looking at the bloom calendar I still want a fall bloomer. Filtering for September–November: aster, hoary mountain mint, orange coneflower. Let me add orange coneflower in the front and goldenrod in the back.

For a small ground cover in the front, I'll remove the "good for pollinators" filter — not every plant needs to be a pollinator plant. I find selfheal — a plant I'd seen at a seed swap but never grown. Adding a few along the front edge.

[19:30] There's our pollinator patch.

Export overview

[20:25] Before we fork a version, let's look at what you can print and take to your yard. Open Export from the ellipsis menu.

The export builder auto-generates several views of your garden: an illustration, a photo-mode preview, a builder spec (grid overlay with plant letter codes, useful when you're actually in the garden placing transplants), and a plan view with labeled circles. Scrolling down: bill of materials with plant counts, mulch estimates, bloom schedule, and plant appendix.

Adding surfaces and forking versions

[22:09] Back on the canvas — you can add a surface to any shape. "Add surface" in the control panel sets a fill: soil, wood chips, bricks, gravel, and more. Paid subscribers can upload a custom pattern to match real materials.

[22:55] Now let's fork this garden. From the ellipsis menu, Save a Copy — let's call it V2. Now I'm on V2. Let's swap the monarda for butterfly weed. Done. You can create as many versions as you want this way. Each one is a separate garden on your My Gardens page, with a preview thumbnail that updates every ~30 seconds.

Q&A from the chat

[25:21] Two questions from the chat:

"Does it show the level of growing aggression or spread?" — The advanced filters include a "growth behavior" field: clump-forming, rhizomatous, stoloniferous, etc. There's also a warning flag for plants considered invasive outside their native range, which is a good proxy for aggressive spreading.

"Can you do other shapes, like a triangle?" — Yes. The shapes library includes triangle, half circle, teardrop, diamond, freeform polygon, and line. For precise dimensions, you can enter exact numbers instead of dragging.

[27:12] The freeform polygon is the most powerful shape tool. You can click to place straight-sided polygons, or press and hold at each point to create bezier curves — building the kind of swoopy border garden shapes that would be hard to get any other way. Brush strokes (freehand painting with surface patterns) are another option when you just want to quickly sketch a path.

[29:48] The image tool lets you place top-down photos of objects not in the catalog — patio tables, arbors, bird baths — and scale them to their real dimensions by entering a known measurement.

Complex garden tour

[31:40] The audience voted for a complex garden, so let's look at one of mine — a full yard conversion to a meadow. Planted in clusters with a bit of matrix planting, roughly one plant per square foot in each block.

The bloom calendar on this one is really satisfying — you can see different parts of the yard lighting up at different times of the season.

[33:35] This garden has a house footprint, a driveway, and multiple garden bed shapes drawn with freeform polygons and curves. Layers let you show and hide structural elements — toggle off the house and hardscape to see just the plants.

[34:15] Here's what the share link looks like to someone else — read-only, can hover plants to see their names and details, can zoom and pan, but can't move or edit anything.

[34:47] And here's the export for a complex garden. On letter size you get the full overview. For organizations, Arch D (24×36") is available. The export builder lets you add snapshots zoomed into specific beds, text pages for care notes, and side-by-side image layouts — it's a customizable document, not just a single screenshot.

Community gardens

[38:34] Here are some community gardens for inspiration. "Lot 18" — someone's impressive site plan, with paths labeled by use, a mulch background layer, and the plants organized into layers by type: grasses, flowers, shrubs, trees.

[39:47] Here's one where the user overlaid their entire design on the satellite map view. They set their property bounds, captured the map as a background, and designed directly on top of it. This one looks like a large field being converted to meadow.

[40:41] That's a wrap. Thank you all for coming out. I hope you learned something and give it a try. Bye, everybody.