PLANNING YOUR NATIVE GARDEN: With Native Garden Planner

Created in partnership with the Sag Moraine Native Plant Community, this webinar demonstrates how thoughtful planning can make designing a native landscape simpler, more enjoyable, and more successful.

The session walks through the design of three very different native gardens from start to finish, showcasing the complete planning process—from selecting plants and arranging them by height, bloom time, and site conditions to creating layouts that are both visually appealing and ecologically beneficial. Along the way, viewers will learn practical design techniques, common planning considerations, and how Native Garden Planner streamlines the process of designing native landscapes.

Whether you're planning your first pollinator garden or a larger restoration project, this webinar provides a practical introduction to designing native gardens with confidence before planting season begins.

Transcript

[0:00] Welcome to planning your native garden with Native Garden Planner, a design tool built specifically for native plant gardens. I'm Lexi from Sagmarine Native Plant Community. Planning a native garden often means working with plants that may be new or less familiar. While the basics of gardening still apply, it's not always obvious how these plants fit together or how a native garden will look and function over time. Taking time to plan helps bring clarity to those decisions and supports more intentional choices, resulting in a garden that feels cohesive and designed.

[0:37] So, in today's live stream, it's focused on planning for your 2026 native garden. Hannah, the developer of Native Garden Planner, is joining us to walk through the tool she created to help make that planning process clearer. She'll demonstrate three different native garden designs and show how planning ahead helps visualize choices long before planting begins.

[0:59] Hannah is a software engineer with over 10 years of experience and a hobbyist native gardener. After struggling to find a tool that combined real planting precision with the ability to visualize plant combinations next to each other, she built Native Garden Planner. Over the past year, she developed the tool to help gardeners confidently plan native landscapes that are both gorgeously designed and ecological powerhouses. Welcome, Hannah.

[1:27] >> Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

[1:30] >> We're just thrilled to have you join us today. I was telling Hannah that I actually found her tool when I was looking at other rendering tools and planning tools for landscape design. I was looking for one that specifically included native plants and I couldn't find one — and she popped up in the search results. I'm so glad that I did and we can share this story together about how to use the tool.

[1:57] >> So let's get started with just a couple questions — and we are going to have a Q&A session at the end of the live stream. So make sure to get your questions ready and put them into the chat. The first one is: what led you to create Native Garden Planner?

[2:16] >> Yeah. So I was building a garden in my backyard and learning more and more about sustainable landscaping and native plant gardening as a whole. It's like one of those things — the more you learn about it, the more interesting it is and this whole world opens up. But I was having a really hard time finding a tool that didn't show invasive species and showed plants that would actually make a difference in my backyard. I was doing this weird hybrid where I would get books from the library and graph them on actual graph paper. But moving them around was really difficult, and trying to visualize them next to each other — I just pulled up Microsoft Paint and started smashing pictures next to each other. I was like, "This is impossible. There's got to be a better way." That's when I started kicking around the idea. Then I discovered a Reddit thread for native plant gardening, and other people had talked about that too. So I was like, "I should post this and give this to other people." That's kind of the story.

[3:27] >> It's incredible how quickly you built the tool. You built it about a year ago.

[3:32] >> That's right. Yeah.

[3:35] >> So, what's a good place for a homeowner to start when planning their garden?

[3:40] >> Yeah. So I think probably the most important thing is to really know your conditions as best as possible. Something that was pretty tricky in my backyard — if you have full sun, it's pretty obvious, but for everybody else, you're kind of in this weird mix where you're like, "Okay, based on my trees, this part gets more sun than other parts." And then everything changes when all the leaves come in. Looking at plants that you already have in the area can be a really good indicator of the types of conditions you have, rather than just trying to look at the sun and see where it falls. That was a really helpful tip that I received.

[4:40] Dimensions are really helpful to know — you don't want to overcrowd your space, and if you undercrowd your space with native plants, nature's going to fill a vacuum so you're going to be doing a lot of weeding. And then the third one is probably just knowing your general style or vibe. A trap I almost fell into with my first garden was trying to do too many different colors and different elements in one garden. That's where having the tool up and running was really helpful — I could say, okay, maybe I pick a few key colors, a few pops of color, and then everything looks a little more cohesive.

[5:42] >> So when someone is planning a native garden, how would they start by measuring their space and translating those dimensions into the tool?

[5:54] >> I think there's a couple ways. Something that I did that I think is easiest — if you're walking the perimeter, you can use a tape measure just to get your general project bounds for straight lines. Once you start adding complex elements with curves or subplots that are complex shapes, I like to use yard stakes that you stake in the ground and then string. You can manipulate the string however you want — it's really easy to make curved shapes with that bright orange neon string. Once you're happy with the shape, you just take the string and measure it.

[7:01] >> What are the biggest benefits of having a plan before planting?

[7:06] >> Oh, lots of benefits. Number one — during the actual planting, it's really helpful so that you don't get overwhelmed and forget where plants go, and end up with plants that are squished in some areas and too spread out in others. If you can plot it down to the foot or the square foot, then you're not going to be surprised when things look off at the end.

[7:38] A big one is also just having confidence that what you're going to end up with is what you want. Being able to quickly see — oh, if I put these two plants next to each other, they're going to compete because they're similar widths and heights. Or, I really like the texture of this leaf next to this more delicate plant with these tendrils. It's really nice to see in advance that the aesthetic vibe you're going for is going to come out.

[8:11] And then the third one is it's really nice to have a plan so that when things go wrong, you can reference it and go back and say, "Okay, well, this plant didn't work. I knew that was going to be a stretch. I don't quite have enough sun for that." And you can start to update the plan with things that are more accurate to your actual space.

[8:30] >> Awesome. Well, with that, let's transition over to the demo and Hannah's going to show us all of her amazing design. Take it away.

[8:41] >> Will do. All right, everybody give a holler if you can't see my screen. I'm just on the Native Garden Planner homepage. I'm going to skip all the boring login stuff and kind of just go straight into planning a garden. It's going to create a brand new space for me. The first one we're going to do — I thought it would be fun to do a simple mailbox pollinator sunny garden. Let's just say Missouri sunny garden. All I really know is that I live in Missouri, I want straight natives, and I have a pretty sunny patch.

[9:38] Now I'm at the part where I need to define the bounds of my space. I'm a good preparer so I already know that my space is roughly 18 by 12. I click to anchor my rectangle — you can see over here in the corner, construction mode is set to rectangle, which means I just have to set one corner and then another corner and then I'm done. As I'm moving my mouse, the dimensions on the lines are changing to give me an idea of how long each of the segments are. 18 by 12 — yep, that's correct. And now I have my space.

[10:21] A little boring, just a white rectangle. So let's give it a pattern. Right now everything's just grass. We're going to up the opacity — and there's my yard. It's not entirely accurate because there is a road that runs around the corner. My Missouri house lives on a corner — let's add that corner in just to more accurately reflect what we're looking at.

[11:03] So now we're in free form. I clicked this plus button to add a new element, and the options are a garden bed, hardscaping, or a plant. I clicked hardscaping because it's going to be the pavement. As I click in free form mode, it's just going to create this polygon. I'm doing this — you can see it's creating this L shape, it comes 3 feet in. Now I'm going to make a curve because there's kind of a rounded curve there, not a sharp edge. Anytime you're making a curve, you want to put one point at the start of the curve and one point at the end of the curve, then hold and drag to get the shape you want.

[13:53] All right, now we have our shape, but let's get to the fun part — the plants. We have filters applied to the entire project because when we created it, we said we lived in Missouri and we want straight natives. So they're going to be automatically applied here.

[15:22] I really like butterfly weed because I don't think there are a lot of orange plants. I'm just going to start with butterfly weed and put that right in the corner in a little cluster. In general, people tell you to plant in odd numbers — which I think holds true but shouldn't be taken as gospel in some cases. We have a little cluster of butterfly weed. Nice little pop of color. As you can see down here, this is our bloom calendar — at a glance you can see what's happening in your garden throughout the months. We've got a summer bloomer here, which is great.

[16:44] I have saved in my pollinator plants a couple of grasses that I like. Let's take little bluestem — it's interesting throughout all four seasons, it turns really cool colors in the fall. Let's add this one right next to butterfly weed. As soon as I click add plant, I enter this stamp mode where any time I click to place, it puts the plant exactly where I want. That's how I'm able to create these little clusters quickly and easily.

[21:40] At any point I can always toggle the view to see roughly the space a plant takes up. This is the design mode — a little illustration of what the plant looks like. Or I can enter photo mode — and like this is a bad photo because sometimes it just picks the first photo it finds from Wikipedia Creative Commons. I can always search that and look for a more appealing image, or upload a photo. I actually have a photo of Partridge Pea, so I'm going to upload that — and there it is, looks like this shrubby little bush. I'm going to save that.

[27:32] Now we have this pollinator garden. Down here in our bloom calendar, you can see when things are starting to show up. This is further illustrated by clicking on one of these months — I can start to see when things are coming in to bloom. By August, things are really kicking ready to go. Prairie dropseed blooms later in the season. This is specifically when the flowers should be blooming, not when they'll have their leaves. So that's just a little visual indicator of when your garden is going to pop at different times.

[27:32] That's our first garden. The last thing we need to add is our mailbox. There's a section of the settings tab called background images — you can do a lot with this. I add an image, I have a mailbox ready to go. I scale it and add it. Then I can start upping the Z-index until it's kind of above everything I want. And there we go — that is our front mailbox garden.

[31:41] >> Oh great. Okay, well for the next one, we're going to work with some shade. I have prepared a garden just so you don't have to watch me do all the curves again. Here's where we're starting from for the next one. This is my forest representation in the background — I've got these big tulip trees that cast a whole bunch of shade on here. I've already created all of these individual plots because this is the pathway I want.

[56:24] >> Yeah, let's just take a couple questions now while they're piling up in the chat. I'm really glad you showed the woodland garden because one of the questions was: are there trees and shrubs in the tool? Can you talk a little bit about the different plant formats supported in the database?

[56:39] >> Yes, absolutely. From your catalog tab, one of your quick filters is all the categorizations we have: shrub, tree, vine, perennial, and annual. Those are all of the ones. We don't have too many annuals, honestly — most native plants fall into some of the other categories. We have almost 2,300 plants across all regions and zones.

[57:15] >> And these are in North America and Canada — all of North America, is that correct?

[57:20] >> Yeah, that's correct. There's a heavy skew towards Midwest and East, but there are still some options for people west of that too. And it's growing as fast as I can.

[57:32] >> Awesome. And I saw somewhere that it said container — like there are plants for containers?

[57:46] >> Yes. Down here in your advanced feature set you're going to have landscape uses. The data comes from a couple of different sources — if any of those sources happen to mention it as a good use for a border, a hedge, a foundation planting, a good plant to grow in a container, or ground cover, anything like that, it will be tagged that way. Not every plant is tagged with all of its uses, but if the data happened to mention it, it's there.

[58:30] >> Super smart. And we do have another question from Elaine: "Does the planner have the ability to place shade on the plan?" So if you had an existing oak tree — what is the shade perimeter of that tree?

[58:45] >> That's a great question and honestly a great feature suggestion. We do not have that right now. The only way I can think of to hack it — if you just wanted internal notes to say this specific section is really shady, you could create a shape and change its color to darker. But I really like that as an idea — if I know this tulip tree is 120 feet tall, I should be able to cast a shadow.

[59:44] >> And you also have spacing in for each of the plants, is that correct?

[59:49] >> Yes. When it's added to the planner, it comes in at its maximum width or height. Something that's truly coming out soon is the ability to adjust that — it's really helpful to see year one versus year five, the plants start smaller and get bigger. But right now it comes in at its max width and height.

[1:00:16] >> Very cool. And we do have another question about the plans — maybe we'll work on the next design and then we'll get to the question about what are the different versions available to everybody.

[1:00:30] >> Yeah, that sounds great. Okay, so the last one is faster, I promise. But I do just want to touch on another valuable way to start a garden — and that's if you have an address or you want to start from a map view. Let me get my last example here. Let's say I live in Ohio. This geo layer — I found this random house on Redfin or Zillow and decided I was going to use it as an example. Here's the house on the map. As soon as I save it, it's going to auto-calculate how big that area is and drop it in here. Then I can rotate this to line up with my grid and start adding hardscaping elements on top.

[1:06:57] I also want to mention — if you're evaluating different layout options, I can always hit this save button. That'll save a copy exactly as it is now and I'll have two versions I can simultaneously work with. I recommend using this tool to block out where you want your areas of focus to be, because it can help structure your thoughts — this one for flowers, this one for shrubs and trees, this one for some sort of combination. It just helps break it down into more accessible chunks.

[1:10:29] >> Awesome. So, why don't we talk about the plans available on nativegardenplanner.com?

[1:10:35] >> Yes, of course. So the free version — and there will always be a free version, absolutely — that gets you three separate projects and access to the basic rectangle gardens and basic hardscaping. If you want to make use of the curves feature, or extremely large gardens or multiple beds, that is available under three prices. Month-to-month is $12; if you purchase it quarterly, basically just for the spring season, that comes out to about $10 a month; and then if you want a yearly subscription, that's $96 — just under 100 bucks.

[1:11:16] >> And the landscaper version — is that coming soon?

[1:11:22] >> Yes. The designer version is coming soon. If you're a small landscaping company, it'll offer additional features like the ability to send designs directly to clients as you draft them, and they can leave feedback notes on them. It'll have project management tools for your team, so you can assign designers to projects. It'll have intake forms that you can paste anywhere on your website — people can upload inspiration photos, tell you what they're looking for, talk about their site, enter their address, and it'll auto-apply a bunch of filters. And you'll have the ability to share lists between your entire design organization, add custom plants, and share them with all your designers.

[1:14:53] >> It's amazing. Yeah, and we've already gotten comments from other people using your tool and sharing what they're doing in real life to make a difference in their own gardens and communities. We'll be featuring some of those coming up. And please don't forget to like and subscribe to Stag Marine, and definitely check out Native Garden Planner. We thank you so much for joining us tonight and we will see you soon.