Landscape planning · Now in alpha
Plan your yard the way it'll actually grow through a Minnesota winter and out the other side.
Plotting Plants is a landscape design tool that runs in your browser. Draw your property to scale, place from a curated, growing library of cold-hardy plants, and scrub each one from the size it ships at to the canopy it'll throw in twenty years. No login. No upload.
Opens a working plan. Saves to this browser. Free while it's in alpha.
The editor
A real drawing, not a moodboard.
Everything is drawn to real-world scale. A full-grown 'Limelight' takes up exactly the room it will against the house, and the beds you draw are the beds you'll dig.
Sized to your lot
Set the property line, drop in an aerial photo to trace, and place plants by clicking the lawn. A scale bar sits in the corner the whole time, so every distance on the plan is the real one.
Beds you can reshape
Draw a planting bed freehand, then push and pull its edge until it fits the yard. Pick mulch, stone, or turf and it fills with the right wash.
A keyed schedule
New plants key as T1, T2; what's already in the ground keys as E1, E2. The sidebar keeps a running plant list and count as you go.
Export and keep it
Export to PNG or SVG to print or mark up, or to JSON to save and reopen. Your plan lives on your machine — nothing is uploaded.
See it before you dig
Two things a static drawing can't show you.
Watch it grow
A one-gallon maple and a mature one are not the same design. Toggle Today, +5, +10, +20, or Mature, and every canopy redraws at the size it would honestly be — each species carries its own install radius, growth rate, and years to maturity.
So you can space for year twenty instead of crowding for year one.
One species, install size through maturity.
The same plan, recolored season by season.
Change the season
One toggle recolors the whole plan — spring leaf-out, summer green, fall reds and golds, winter structure. It's the fastest way to catch the gap most yards have: a border that disappears in February.
Every plant in the library carries its own four-season palette, drawn straight onto the plan.
The library
Plants picked for winters that bite.
A curated library, built for cold-climate, Northern gardens and always growing — the kind of cold that decides whether a Japanese maple is a centerpiece or a stick by April.
Specimen Maple 
Flowering Tree 
Hydrangea 
Conifer 
Shrub 
Perennial 
Grass The deep end is the maples, including the Iseli Jack Frost® hybrids bred to take an Upper-Midwest winter — North Wind®, documented hardy to roughly −30°F, where a true Japanese maple gives up. Every plant opens to seasonal color, hardiness, lifecycle photos, and links out to nurseries and extension offices.
Who it's for
Built first for the person standing in their own front yard.
Homeowners
Try a North Wind maple against three hydrangeas and see the fall before you spend a dollar.
Businesses
Nurseries and builders: show a plant at maturity, not a pot, and hand off a clean plan.
Landscape pros
Sketch a scaled concept fast, with real growth models behind every canopy and a schedule that reads like a drawing.
Where it stands
It's alpha. Here's the honest line between the two.
No vapor. This is what works the moment you open it, and what we're still building.
Works today
- The scale editor: place, drag, swap, draw and reshape beds
- A growing cold-climate library with search and filters
- Four-season recolor across the whole plan
- Install-to-mature growth, per species
- PNG / SVG / JSON export and import
- Auto-save to your browser — no account needed
Still coming
- Written planting, pruning, and watering guidance
- Photos and links on the newest plants
- Cloud save, accounts, and shareable plans
- A layout that works on a phone in the yard
- More regions and zones beyond the Upper Midwest
- Rough cost and material estimates
Open the sheet
Start with a blank lawn and a maple.
It opens to a working plan you can edit or clear. Nothing to install, nothing to sign.