Native Garden Planner

Get familiar with the Control Panel and navigation tools in Native Garden Planner! In this quick tutorial, we'll explore the buttons and controls that help you navigate the canvas, switch design modes, and make the most of your workspace.

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 zoom in and out of your design
How to pan and navigate around the canvas
How to switch between design modes
What the different toolbar and control panel buttons do
Tips for working more efficiently in the editor

Transcript

[0:00] Hey everybody, welcome to the next video. In this one we're going to walk through the control panel — the white toolbar on the right side of the canvas — and cover what each button does.

Design modes

[0:29] At the very top of the control panel is the mode toggle. There are three modes:

Design (default) — shows botanical illustrations of your plants. This is your main working view.
Shape — strips everything down to labeled circles, useful when you want to see spacing and layout without the visual noise of illustrations.
Photo — replaces illustrations with real photographs of each plant, so you can get a sense of how combinations will actually look together.

Undo and redo

[1:05] Below the mode toggle are undo and redo buttons. You can also use Ctrl/Cmd+Z to undo and Ctrl/Cmd+Y to redo from the keyboard.

Zoom

[1:24] There are three ways to zoom:

Scroll wheel — scroll up to zoom in, scroll down to zoom out
Pinch to zoom — on touch devices
Zoom controls in the panel — the magnifying glass with a minus sign zooms out, the plus sign zooms in, and you can also drag the zoom slider. The grid indicator updates as you zoom so you always have a real-world scale reference.

The Fit to View button (also Ctrl/Cmd+Enter) snaps the zoom back so your entire garden fits in the viewport — useful whenever you've zoomed too far in or out and lost your bearings.

Pan

[3:02] The pan button temporarily turns your cursor into a hand for moving around the canvas without placing or selecting anything.

Most of the time, clicking and dragging on an empty area of the canvas already pans. But the pan button is specifically useful when your cursor is committed to another task. Two good examples:

While drawing a polygon — if you need to scroll to a different part of the canvas mid-draw, activate pan, move to where you need to be, then deactivate and continue drawing.
While in stamp mode — if you've placed one plant and want to pan over to place another without exiting stamp mode, activate pan, move, then return to stamping.

The plus menu — adding elements

[4:28] The plus (+) button opens a menu for adding things to the canvas:

Shapes — the basic shapes library (rectangle, circle, triangle, etc.) and freeform polygon, covered in previous videos
Add Plant — opens the Browse tab in the sidebar (same as clicking Browse directly)
Add Label — drops a text label onto the canvas that you can reposition and edit
Add Image — uploads a background or reference image; also accessible from the Settings sidebar tab
Add Map — toggles on the satellite map layer (covered in a later video)

Delete / Start Over

[5:36] The delete menu gives you options to clear the canvas in bulk:

All Plants — removes every plant from the canvas
All Garden Beds — removes all shapes classified as plots
Start Over — wipes everything: all plants, shapes, surfaces, and labels. You'll need to redraw your project space from scratch. This cannot be undone, so each option includes a confirmation prompt before anything is deleted.

Grid

[6:18] The grid toggle shows or hides the background grid. Keyboard shortcut: Ctrl/Cmd+G. Useful for eyeballing spacing and alignment as you place elements.

The ellipsis (⋯) menu — project actions

[6:35] The ellipsis menu at the bottom of the control panel holds project-level actions:

Save a Copy — forks the current garden into a new copy under your account. Useful for testing variations side by side (e.g. "front row version 1" vs. "front row version 2") without losing what you have.
Share a Link — copies a read-only link to your clipboard. Recipients can view the garden, zoom, and hover to see plant info, but cannot edit anything.
Take a Screenshot — captures the current canvas view (at your current zoom and position) and saves it as an export image. Screenshots you take here show up in the Export Builder, where you can arrange them into your planting plan document.
See in 3D (experimental) — submits a render request for a photorealistic 3D view of your garden. You can select a specific area or render the whole garden. Renders are delivered within 24 hours and cost $5 each, as they rely on an external rendering service.
Review Garden (experimental) — runs a compatibility check across your entire garden. It flags plants that don't match your project-level growing conditions (e.g. a full-sun plant in a part-shade garden) and also checks plant-to-plant compatibility — for example, flagging a 2–4 ft boneset placed in front of 4–6 inch ground cover plants that it would overwhelm. These are warnings, not errors, and they're there to help you catch things before planting.

Visibility controls

[9:57] At the bottom of the control panel are visibility toggles for quickly showing and hiding different element types on the canvas — plants, shapes, labels, etc. The same controls are available in the Layers tab of the sidebar if you prefer to work from there.

That's a full tour of the control panel. The brush tool, eraser tool, and map layer each get their own videos later in the series.