Native Garden Planner

Since our last update we've shipped one of our biggest feature sets yet — new guided ways to design a garden, a way to walk through your plan at eye level, richer plant photography across the seasons, and a much more complete export document. Jump to the section most relevant to you.

Guided Planting Areas

Design by shape, not by plant

There's a new way to design a planting without placing every plant by hand. Draw a shape — a pot, a planter, or a garden bed — and turn it into a guided planting layout: the planner generates evenly spaced plant spots and fills them with species that match your growing conditions. From the canvas Add menu, choose Create container for a pot or planter, or Create matrix bed for a naturalistic, seeded planting area. You can also attach a guided layout to a shape you've already drawn from its detail drawer.

Matrix Garden template

A new Matrix Garden template is available on Create Your Garden. A matrix garden is a naturalistic planting inspired by wild plant communities: a matrix layer of native grasses and sedges covers the ground, with flowering perennials woven through in small colonies and a few taller structural accents for winter interest. The wizard walks you through bed size, native region, a role-mix slider (matrix / seasonal / structural), spacing density, and a habitat type — dry prairie, mesic prairie, wet meadow, savanna, and more — with an optional step to hand-pick species for each role. Finish the wizard and your garden opens already planted, with layers organized by role.

Container Garden template

Also on Create Your Garden, the Container Garden template is built for patios, balconies, and entryways. Set your growing conditions, add up to six pots or planters in round, square, or rectangular shapes, and the wizard arranges them into a staggered collection — each pot gets its own guided layout, auto-planted with thriller, filler, and spiller roles and ready to fine-tune.

Palettes, generation, and editing

Open any guided layout's drawer to adjust its palette — the species chosen for each role, with editable percentage weights — or leave slots as "Random plant" for the planner to fill automatically. A "Straight natives only" filter is on by default, and you can maintain a list of excluded species the generator will never pick. Container layouts support Fill / Shuffle plants and Regenerate layout; naturalistic layouts use a single Generate action that rebuilds the whole field and replants it from your current settings. Matrix mix configurations (habitat, role mix, palettes, exclusions) can be saved and reused across gardens.

Seed mixes in your export

Because matrix gardens are seeded for their grass layer and planted as plugs for everything else, exports now include a Seed Mixes table for naturalistic planting areas — species shown as a percentage mix over square footage with estimated seed weight in pounds, kept separate from the individual-plant bill of materials.

Front-Facing Views

See your plan at eye level

Place a camera anywhere on your 2D garden plan and open a live, eye-level "front-facing" view of that spot — like standing in the garden and looking down a planting corridor. From the canvas Add menu, choose Front facing snapshot, click to place the camera, and drag to set its field of view. Manage all your cameras from Garden Settings → Front-facing views.

A floating window you can move, resize, and play through the year

Opening a camera launches a floating picture-in-picture preview — drag it by the header, resize it, or go full-screen. Use the month picker, arrow keys, or Play through the year to animate smooth month-to-month crossfades; plants show the right seasonal look for each month, and dormant or out-of-season plants disappear rather than looking stuck in summer foliage. Hover a plant to see its name, scientific name, and size.

More realistic scenes

Views without a custom backdrop now render with a soft sky gradient above the horizon, lawn texture, and ground detail pulled from your surface patterns. Fences, walls, and raised beds can be given height and elevation offset in a shape's settings so they show up correctly in the view.

Save and share

Save an image for your export or to your garden's Project Snapshots, or copy a public share link that opens the garden at that exact camera, month, and playback state — no account required for viewers.

Front-facing views are a Premium feature; anyone viewing a shared link can see them for free.

Seasonal Plant Imagery

Many plants in the catalog now have seasonal photos — foliage, emerging growth, flowering, fruiting, fall color, and winter form — matched to when each plant actually looks that way, in addition to the hand-drawn illustration. On the plant catalog and in the in-garden catalog sidebar, use the View dropdown to switch between Illustrations and seasonal Photos. On a plant's detail page, swipe through the photo carousel to see it across the year. These same images now power the front-facing view above, so what you see in the corridor view matches what you see when browsing plants.

Export Builder

A complete site plan, generated for you

The export builder now assembles a full, ready-to-hand-off document automatically: a redesigned cover page, a new Site Overview map, your whole-garden Builder Spec, then a matched Installation Plan and Planting Schedule for every planting area that has plants, followed by your bloom calendar, biodiversity summary, and bill of materials.

Site Overview

A new orientation page shows the whole property with every planting area outlined and labeled A, B, C, and so on, paths and surfaces shown lightly for context, a scale bar, and a legend tying each letter to its bed name — so readers can see how the site is organized before diving into bed-by-bed detail.

Installation Plans and Planting Schedules, bed by bed

Each planting area now gets its own zoomed-in Installation Plan — every plant marked by ID, a scale bar, a measurement grid, and two labeled reference corners with the baseline distance called out directly on the drawing — paired with a Planting Schedule table giving each plant's distance from both reference corners plus distance to its nearest neighbor. Scientific names now appear alongside common names throughout. These pages are built for installers and contractors who need to place plants accurately in the field.

A more polished document

The cover page has been rebuilt to feel like a printed landscape-architecture document — a compact brand lockup, a strong title, your garden rendering as the dominant visual, and a restrained footer. The Bloom Schedule now reads seasonally, with months grouped into Spring, Summer, and Fall and bloom periods shown as continuous color bars. Documents use the Lexend typeface with forest-green headers throughout, and the Builder Spec legend now shows scientific names without row shading for cleaner printing.

Full control over which pages ship

You can remove any auto-generated page — the Site Overview, or any bed's Installation Plan or Planting Schedule — from the sidebar, and restore it later from a "Removed pages" section if you change your mind.

Shop, Orders & Pricing

Shop NGP

A new merch shop is live at /shop — browse and buy Native Garden Planner branded goods, view multiple photos per product in a carousel, and check out securely via Stripe. Sold-out items offer a "Notify me" waitlist.

Track your orders

Paid 3D render requests now show up alongside merch purchases under Account → Orders, each with status, garden name, and a link back to your garden. Garden card carousels also show 3D renders first, in a stable, date-sorted order.

Pricing pages for how you garden

Two new landing pages tailor pricing to your situation: /plans/hobbyist for home gardeners and /plans/workspaces for teams and organizations. Each opens a focused checkout modal right on the page, and the full pricing comparison is still there if you want to see everything side by side.

Community & Account

Community gardens now default to "Recently updated" so active designs surface first.
You can browse Create Your Garden and preview templates before signing in — an account is only needed once you're ready to actually create a garden.
Canceling a subscription now sends a personal offboarding email with a chance to share feedback.
A new lock zoom toggle in the zoom popover pins your zoom level so sidebar changes and scrolling don't shift the view.

Performance & Bug Fixes

Large gardens pan and zoom noticeably more smoothly — offscreen elements are skipped and the scene freezes to a bitmap during drag/zoom gestures.
Gardens with 1,000+ plants now load reliably.
Reduced production database load from labels, analytics, surfaces, layers, and chat queries.
Plant detail pages now show which seasonal growth stages have front-facing imagery and which are still missing.
Fixed several planting-area and layer bugs: shape moves stranding plants, duplicate planting areas per shape, null layers after reordering, and plants dragged while unselected getting hijacked by canvas panning.
Fixed a race condition that could cancel the wrong subscription when switching plans.
Community gardens filter changes no longer force a full page refresh.

Under the Hood

We also shipped the plumbing behind several of the features above: a plant sociability field and role-suitability scoring for naturalistic fill, a self-healing async job queue for generating seasonal plant images, and Cloudflare-optimized delivery for render and seasonal images across the app.