NGP Basics: Browse Catalog & Add Plants

Learn how to browse the Native Garden Planner plant catalog and add plants to your garden design. In this quick tutorial, we'll cover finding the right plants, placing them on your canvas, and using plants from your own saved collections.

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 browse and search the plant catalog
How to add plants to your garden
How to use plants from your custom library
How to add plants from your saved lists
Tips for quickly finding the plants you need

Transcript

[0:00] Hey everybody. This is part two of creating a simple garden. We've already created our garden project — it's a 10×4 space with a couple of project filters applied. Now I want to get into how you can interact with the catalog to browse for plants and add them to your garden.

In the sidebar, you'll notice we've transitioned away from the Settings tab. The Settings tab holds your project settings along with all the non-plant entities in your garden — shapes, garden beds, hardscaping, labels, background images. But for browsing, discovering, and adding plants, that all happens in the Browse tab.

[0:45] From the Browse tab, you have three main ways to add plants:

Search the main catalog
Search your custom plants (plants you've uploaded yourself)
Add plants from your saved lists

Lists will be covered in their own video, but if you've created lists and added plants to them, you can click into any list and add those plants to your garden the same way you would from the main catalog. For now, let's focus on the main catalog.

[1:20] The first thing you'll see is a search input. If you have a specific plant in mind — say, New England aster — just type it in. Worth noting: your project filters are always active here. In this case I have part shade, full shade, native to Massachusetts, straight natives, and relatively moist soil applied. New England aster needs full sun, so it won't appear — which is the catalog working correctly. Search for "fern" instead and you'll get all the ferns that meet those conditions.

You can search by common name, botanical name, or any alias the plant goes by, and the catalog will do its best to return a match.

[2:14] Just above the results you'll see the quick filters — the fastest way to narrow down by the characteristics that matter most when picking a plant: type (perennial, shrub, tree, etc.), sun, soil, rough height and width, and native province. Toggle any of these without opening the full filter panel.

For more fine-tuned filtering, hit the Advanced button. That opens a full panel with characteristics like:

Features and benefits (attracts hummingbirds, drought tolerant, has berries, etc.)
Warnings (invasive outside native range)
Growth behavior (clump-forming, rhizomatous, etc.)
Bloom color
Winter state (evergreen, semi-evergreen, herbaceous)

For example, if I filter for semi-evergreen or evergreen — given all my other conditions — I get 11 results.

[3:38] In the results, you can toggle between two views: Illustration (the stylized plant drawings) and Photos (real photographs). If a plant doesn't have a photo yet, you can click "Find Images" to search Wikipedia Creative Commons and attach a freely licensed photo yourself. I'll do that here for marginal wood fern — found one I like, and saved it.

[4:20] Clicking on any plant opens its detail panel. You'll see:

Full common name, scientific name, and any aliases in an "Also known as" field
A straight species flag — if you don't see it, the plant is a cultivar or nativar
The Find Images tool for adding a photo
A bloom indicator showing the rough color and bloom window by month
Key details: height, width, growing conditions, features, hardiness zones
Reviews — you can upvote ("Garden Favorite") or downvote ("Would Not Recommend") based on your experience, and leave a comment. If you've grown this plant and want to say "it took over my garden" or "it was incredible," this is the place.

[5:53] When you're ready to add a plant to your garden, you have a few options:

From the results list — hover over a plant card and click "Add Plant"
From the detail panel — click "Add to Garden"
Click and drag from the catalog directly onto the canvas

All three enter stamp mode, where your cursor becomes a scaled preview of the plant at its mature size. Click anywhere on the canvas to place it. You can also click and drag across an area to fill it with evenly spaced plants all at once.

Once a plant is placed, you can add more of the same plant by selecting it on the canvas and clicking "Place More of This Plant" — that puts you back in stamp mode. Or use Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V to copy and paste, or the Duplicate option from the plant's context menu.

[7:32] One more useful thing while browsing: if you come across a plant you like but aren't ready to add it yet, you can save it to one of your lists on the fly — or create a new list right from the catalog. Then later, from the Lists tab in the Browse panel, you can pull plants directly from that list into any garden. This is great if you've been building a shortlist for a specific project — say, "Missouri pollinator plants" — and want to work from that instead of searching the full catalog each time.

[8:25] Finally, the source selector at the top of the Browse tab lets you switch between the main catalog and your own custom plants. If you have a Hobbyist subscription or above, you can add plants that don't belong in the native catalog — a Japanese maple, an existing shrub in your yard, anything you just want to represent on the canvas. Those custom plants live under "My Plants" and work exactly the same way as catalog plants when adding them to a garden.

And that's the crash course on the catalog — how to search it, filter it, read plant details, and get plants onto your canvas.