Planting Plans

This section should help you to read and create planting plans

Symbols

It is widespread practice where I am to revert to simple circles for your plant symbols. A cross in the middle denotes the centre of the trunk where the root ball is planted. Some people will use dots in the centre. I personally prefer to use crosses for proposed plants as I already use circles to denote existing trees to show the girth of the trunk in a scale drawing. There is no need to use flourishes or colours on your symbols as tags coming off them will link with your plant schedule to tell the reader what plant it represents. Below are examples of some of the ways we can show the different plant groupings.

Example of symbols for different plant groupings

Line Weights

When drawing by hand or on the computer this guide will give you a starting point buy you should refine your hierarchy to suit your graphics style. Generally, on the computer you can get away with finer weights than you can by hand.

Trees - 0.5mm

Medium Cover (shrubs) - 0.35mm

Low cover (groundcovers and small plants) - 0.15mm

Tags

Tags should show an abbreviation for the plant you are using and the quantity within that cluster of identical species. They should be kept short so that your drawing is not cluttered up with full botanical names. People use differing amounts of letters for their tags. If you are doing your plans by hand, you can keep them short E.g. Li for Lagerstroemia indica. Whereas, on a computer you can create large databases of plants that can be dragged and dropped in. In this circumstance you may wish to use something longer like Lind so that there is less chance of having conflicts of duplicate names in your database. This will help remove the need for renaming your symbols for each project as conflicts occur. As you start to add more cultivars or subspecies etc. of the same plant you can make and amendment such as Lin’N’ for Lagerstroemia indica ‘Natchez’.

I personally prefer this method of using one letter for the genus of a plant in upper case and three letter for the species in lower case as it is often enough characters for me to guess or remember what the plant might be without having to refer to the plant schedule.

Example of different tag layouts

Legends

Schedules

Plant Schedules / Lists accompany the planting plan. The abbreviation you use on your tag must be the first column on your schedule so that it the reader can quickly ascertain which plant on the plan corresponds to which plant in the schedule.

Necessary Columns at minimum

• Abbreviation / reference

• Botanical Name

• Quantity

• Pot Size for purchase

Other information

There are other elements commonly included on planting plans:

• Planting detail (covered in another section) or multiple planting details - They show how to install different plants of varied sizes in different contexts.

• Specifications (covered in another section)- This is a text-based addition to your plan which might be used to convey things like soil preparation, mulching, weed removal etc.

Presentations

Activity

Create a planting plan on the provided plan here.

Include the plan (symbols and tags), a legend, a plant schedule and a titleblock. The plan is drawn at a scale of 1:50 on an A3 sheet of paper.