NGP Basics: Add a Custom Plant

Learn how to create your own custom plants in Native Garden Planner! Whether you're adding a favorite cultivar, a local ecotype, or a plant that's missing from the catalog, this tutorial will show you how to build your own reusable plant library.

This video is part of the NGP Basics series — a step-by-step playlist that covers everything you need to know to design your first native garden, from creating a project to choosing plants and exporting your finished design.

In this video you'll learn:

• How to create a custom plant
• How to enter plant details and customize its appearance
• How to choose a plant symbol and colors
• How to save custom plants to your personal library
• How to use your custom plants in any garden project

Transcript

[0:01] Welcome to part three of designing a simple garden. In the last video we covered interacting with the plant catalog — editing project-level filters, switching between the main catalog and custom plants, and adding from lists. Now we're on to adding custom plants.

When you're designing a garden, there are often plants that already exist in the space — or plants you want to include — that aren't in the native catalog. Maybe it's a non-native that's already in your yard, or a cultivar you love. Custom plants let you represent anything on the canvas. This feature is available on Hobbyist and above.

[0:42] To add a custom plant, I'll use the example of a Japanese maple in my yard. I don't even know its scientific name off the top of my head, so I'll hit the AI autofill button to do some of the heavy lifting.

The autofill reaches out to a model trained on data from authoritative sources like USDA Plants to pre-populate fields as accurately as possible. It looks like this one was already cached — someone else requested Japanese maple before — so the results come back immediately. You can review everything it proposes: scientific name, size, growing conditions, and any warnings. I notice it flagged that Japanese maple is invasive outside its native range, which I actually didn't know. I'll click "Apply All Proposed" to accept everything.

[1:46] With the data filled in, I can also set a preview image — used when the canvas is in Photo view — by searching Wikipedia Creative Commons for a good photo of the plant. And for the illustration, I'll borrow the symbol from a similar plant (in this case, red maple) so it visually matches the rest of my design. Once everything looks good, I hit Save.

[2:24] The plant is now in my library. To find it, switch the source selector to "My Plants." If it isn't showing up, check whether you have any filters still active — the "straight native" filter, for example, will hide custom non-native plants. Clear the filter and it appears. From there, add it to your garden exactly as you would any catalog plant: hover to get the "Add Plant" button, or click and drag onto the canvas.

[2:43] Once placed, you'll notice the plant comes in at its full cataloged mature size — a Japanese maple might be very large. If that doesn't match your actual tree, select it on the canvas and use the size controls in the plant menu to set a custom width. I'll dial mine back to 8 feet to better represent what I actually have.

[3:06] If you have a lot of custom plants to add at once, use the CSV upload option instead of adding one by one. The uploader shows you the required column headers, and you can download an example CSV to see exactly how a fully filled-out row should look. Copy the headers to your clipboard to paste directly into Google Sheets or Excel, fill in your plant data, then upload the file.

Plants uploaded via CSV come in without images by default. You can go back and add a preview image to any of them by clicking into the plant and using the same Wikipedia Creative Commons search you'd use when adding one at a time.

[4:30] That's custom plants — one at a time using AI autofill, or in bulk via CSV. Once they're in your library, adding them to a garden works exactly the same as stamp mode from the main catalog. See you in the next video.