Landscape Exercise 04 – Proposed Planting

Once a concept design is complete and has been accepted it can be used as the basis of a Proposed Planting Plan. LANDWorksCAD allows users to leverage from the work already completed in the concept plan to produce a proposed planting plan.

The plants inserted using the Insert Proposed Plant tool are understood by the software as being different to either the concept plants or existing plants and the software will count, schedule and label them accordingly.

Just the same as for a concept plan, when starting a proposed planting plan, we can either save the concept plan as a new name, then edit it as required to include proposed plants or we can work on the original concept plan file but have new items on new layers and on a new Layout view.

For this plan let’s simply save the concept drawing as My Proposed Planting Plan.
Select and delete the concept plan labels and text as we no longer need them.
Delete extraneous planes but leave any ground cover planes.

Select the Insert Proposed Plant icon and you’re presented with a similar dialog to the existing plant and concept plant dialogs.

You have the same methods of selecting and inserting plants as before only this time they are linked to thousands of unique botanical names in the database.

To select the desired plant, you can either:

Scroll up or down through the entire database of more than 2000 plants using your mouse wheel or the arrows on your keyboard.
Set up and select from a defined palette of plants to limit what is displayed and/or
Dynamically search by botanical name, common name, or ANY of the column names from the database.

Select your first plant by scrolling through the list until you find the one you desire.
Select the Detailed Component (Detailed Figure) option to set this appearance for the plant.
Select the Replace
Choose a concept plant in your drawing. As you select each concept plant it converts to the proposed plant and adopts the size of the original concept plant.

Note that if you preselect the plants to be replaced, and then select the command you can change them all at once. This is a very fast method of swapping out one plant for another.

Select the command again, only this time set the Search Field to botanical name and type the word camellia into the space provided. Notice the software narrows your selection to just show camellias.
Select one of the camellias from the list and use any of the following insertion methods:
1 Point, 2 Point, Scale 2 Points or Replace.
Choose the Insert Proposed Plant command again only this time press the Reset button to clear the search criteria.
Add more plants into your design and also populate the front yard with proposed plants. Use as many different plant species as you like and be sure to group a few of the same plant species together so we can label them effectively later.

Assuming your design has some grassy regions, we can also explore the Region option for inserting proposed plants. Using the region option allows us to use an existing plane to populate with individual plants or ground cover. Individual plants can be set out randomly or in a pattern.

Use the search method to search by type and enter the word grass into the search field to narrow our selection to grasses.
Pick one of the grasses to insert.
Select the Region method of insertion and you will see the following dialog.

Pick the first option of, Ground Cover and then
Select a plane in your design that represents an area of ground cover. When successful you will see the following dialog naming the plant species you just populated this plane with.
Go back and choose a completely different species of any plant type.
Again, choose Region as the method.
This time set the dialog to show the following options and values.
Select a different plane and you will see multiple Components are planted randomly on the plane at the spacing you specified.
Exit all commands and then double-click on any of the planes you used for mass planting. A dialog box similar to this one will appear.

Like every other entity it shows what properties that Region has and allows you to change the actual appearance of the plane as well as delete the plants in the region.

Planes that have been planted out have quite a bit of in-built intelligence in them and can be used as a method of managing mass plantings on medium to large projects and forestry work.

Refer to the manual for all the options of each command. This tutorial explores how the process works and where to look for the tools. It’s up to you to try the different options to see what they do and how you might use them in your work.

Note