Native Garden Planner

Learn how to share your garden designs and create polished exports in Native Garden Planner! In this quick tutorial, we'll cover the different ways to share your work with friends, clients, or collaborators, and how to export your finished design for printing or digital use.

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 share your garden with a link
How to control sharing and visibility settings
How to export your design as a PDF or image
What information is included in your exports
Tips for creating professional-looking garden plans

Transcript

[0:00] Hey everybody, welcome back. Today we're going over sharing and exporting a garden.

Sharing a garden link

[0:14] From the ellipsis menu in the control panel, click Share Link to copy a read-only link to your garden. Anyone with the link can view your design, zoom in and out, and hover over plants to see their details — but they cannot move or edit anything. It's a good way to share progress with someone and get feedback without giving them edit access. Recipients can also hit Export from the share view to download the same document you'd generate yourself.

The Export Builder

[0:55] To build your own export, click Print / Export from the ellipsis menu. This opens the Export Builder — a document editor where you can configure a multi-page PDF of your garden plan.

When you first land on the page, several snapshots are automatically generated from your current canvas:

Illustration — the design-mode view of your garden with botanical illustrations
Preview — the photo-mode view using real plant photos
Building Spec — a grid overlay with each plant labeled by a short letter code and a legend, designed for use when you're actually in the garden placing flags or transplants
Plan — a simplified view showing each plant as a labeled circle

Hit the refresh button on any image to regenerate it if you've made changes to your design since opening the page.

What's included by default

Scrolling down the Export Builder shows you all the pages in your document:

Title page — project name and any garden notes
Overall plan view — the full canvas with a scale legend
Builder spec — grid overlay with plant letter codes and legend
Bill of materials — plant count table with your plant notes included
Material estimates — calculated mulch and hardscape quantities based on your surface assignments
Plant appendix — one entry per species with photo/illustration and key facts
Bloom schedule — month-by-month breakdown of what's in bloom

Customizing the document

Everything in the export is editable:

Title page — override the title and subtitle to rename the document independently of the project name.

Builder spec table — click into any row to rename a plant (e.g. change "Golden Zizia" to "Golden Alexander"), add notes, or remove a row entirely. Removing a row from the table doesn't remove the plant from your garden — it just leaves it out of this section of the document. Use the Reset button to restore auto-generated values.

Bill of materials — same controls: edit plant names, adjust quantities (e.g. reduce from 4 to 3 because you're getting one from a friend), add notes, or remove a row. Fully editable, fully resettable.

Material estimates / bloom schedule / plant appendix — delete any of these entire pages if you don't need them. Less relevant for small personal projects; more useful for detailed client deliverables.

Adding custom pages

Use the Add Page button to insert new pages into your document. The page types worth knowing:

Text page — a freeform page for notes, care instructions, maintenance schedules, or any other written content you want to include. Type directly into the editor.
Image page — a page built around one of your canvas screenshots. Good for zooming in on a specific bed to show detail not visible in the full overview.
Content page — combines images and text in a configurable column layout. For example, two columns with the illustration preview on one side and the builder spec on the other, each with a caption underneath.

You can drag pages into any order in the document.

Taking screenshots for custom pages

[11:28] Back in the garden editor, the Take Screenshot button in the ellipsis menu captures the current canvas view — whatever zoom level and position you're at — and saves it to your Export Builder's image library under "Canvas Screenshots / Extra Images."

To add detail pages for individual garden beds:

Zoom in on a specific bed in the editor
Take a screenshot
Repeat for any other beds you want to feature
Go back to the Export Builder, add an Image or Content page for each, and select the corresponding screenshot

Generating the PDF

[10:06] When you're ready, click Generate. This kicks off a background job that compiles all your pages and configurations into a single PDF. Once it finishes, click Download.

Important: the Export Builder does not save drafts. Any overrides you've made — renamed plants, deleted rows, custom text, added pages — exist only in your current browser session. If you refresh the page, you'll need to re-enter them. Make any final edits, then generate and download before navigating away.

The finished PDF gives you a complete, printable garden plan — overview, detail shots, plant list, material quantities, and any notes you've added — ready to take outside and put to use.