Native Garden Planner

Learn how to use maps and satellite imagery in Native Garden Planner to design directly on your property! In this quick tutorial, we'll show you how to add a map background, align your design with your yard, and use aerial imagery as a planning guide.

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 add a map or satellite image to your project
How to position and scale the map
How to use aerial imagery as a design reference
Tips for tracing existing landscape features
Best practices for designing directly on your property

Transcript

[0:00] Hey everybody. Today we're going to talk about the map and satellite layers — how you can overlay your project directly on top of a real-world location so your plan is exactly to scale in the place you intend to build it.

Opening the map layer

[0:20] If you entered an address when creating your project, that address sets the default latitude and longitude. From inside the garden editor, click the globe icon in the control panel to open the map layer.

From there you can either search for an address or pan around the map manually. Once you've found the right location, click Move Plan Here — that drops your entire project canvas into the center of the current map view, overlaying it on the satellite imagery.

Fine-tuning the position

[1:12] If you need to adjust exactly where the project sits on the map, enter pin mode. This lets you drag the project center pin to precisely align your canvas with the real-world space underneath — lining up property edges, existing trees, structures, or any other reference points visible in the satellite image.

While in map mode you can also reshape your project area if needed — drag an edge to extend the canvas to match the actual footprint of the space you're designing.

Toggling the map on and off

[1:55] You can show and hide the map layer at any time. When you hide it, you're back to your normal canvas view. Toggle it back on and your project snaps back to the same position on the map — it retains the saved location even if you've panned or zoomed the canvas in the meantime.

Saving a map slice as a background image

[2:25] If you want a static crop of the satellite imagery embedded directly in your project — rather than a live map layer — use Save Map as Background. This captures the current map view as an image and adds it to your canvas as a layer you can show, hide, reorder, or assign to a specific layer group.

The saved image comes in locked by default so it stays anchored in place. You can unlock it if you need to reposition it, though if it was captured correctly you shouldn't need to.

Add Map button

[3:23] The Add Map button in the control panel's plus menu provides the same functionality — navigate to a location, screenshot the view, and add it as a background image layer. Useful if you want to add additional map snapshots at different zoom levels or from different areas of the same project.

The map layer is especially useful for large or complex projects where you need your design to match the exact dimensions and layout of a real property. You can see examples of this in the community gardens gallery — several users have overlaid full residential and site plans directly on top of their satellite imagery.