Native Garden Planner

Learn how to create your first garden project in Native Garden Planner! In this quick tutorial, we'll walk through creating a new project and getting your canvas ready for designing a simple native garden.

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 new garden project
How to set your project name and dimensions
How to choose the right starting options
How to get ready for the next steps in your design

Transcript

[0:00] Hey everybody. I wanted to go over how to create a garden project and fill out some of its details that make the planning process a little easier throughout your project.

Here I am on the Create Your Garden page. You have the option to start with a template — I've clicked on this Minnesota garden, for example. You'll see an option to "Save a Copy," which duplicates the garden under your account and lets you start tweaking it. That's a great option if you want something to start from, since starting from a blank canvas can feel a little intimidating.

Or, you can start from scratch, which is what I'm going to do now. When you hit that, you're prompted with a modal to name your garden. Let's call this "Front Sidewalk."

[0:48] The next four inputs are the length and width — the dimensions of the total project area you're designing. If you're just designing a single garden bed, enter the dimensions of that bed. But if you're working on an entire residential or commercial property with multiple garden beds throughout the space, enter the total length and width of the whole area. For today, we're going to create a simple 12 by 4.

[1:17] Address is really helpful if you have a Hobbyist subscription or above, because you'll have access to the satellite imagery and map layer. Setting an address puts a center point on that map layer at the location you enter. But that'll be its own video, so I'm going to skip that for now.

[1:33] Growing conditions are the details about your project site that you want to save for your planning. Everything you enter here gets applied to your plant catalog as default filters — so when you go to search for plants, you won't have to keep re-entering that you live in Massachusetts, or that you have full shade, or part shade. You set it once here and it carries through.

That's all I'm going to fill out for now. I'll hit Go, it creates the garden, and you'll be redirected to your new canvas.

[2:17] Now you can see in the sidebar on the left — this is your project settings. The name says "Front Sidewalk," the total area is there, and if you need to resize the project space later, you can click and drag to adjust it right here.

[2:41] You can also add a surface at this stage. Since this is going to be a simple garden bed, I'm going to leave it as soil — but you could set it to grass if your default background is a yard of lawn, or to wood chips if that's what you're working with. This controls how the background looks on your canvas. Any shape you add later will also let you set its own surface properties.

If none of the built-in patterns are what you're looking for, you also have the option to upload a custom surface pattern. That's really useful if you're planning a walkway or patio and you have the actual paver image from Home Depot or wherever — you can upload it to match the real material as closely as possible.

[3:37] If you ever need to edit any of these details after setup, just come back to this first card in the Settings tab in the sidebar. It even says "Click to edit project settings and appearance." So if you need to adjust your filters — say you decide you only want straight natives — you can apply that there, and the catalog will reflect it immediately.

[4:15] And that's it for video one! I just wanted to walk through how you create a new project, what those form fields actually mean in relation to the rest of your planning, and where to find them again if you need to make changes. See you in the next one.