The story
It started with one front yard in Minnetonka.
Zone 5a. A north-facing front yard that gets sun late and loses it early. And a pile of maple cultivars at the nursery, every tag promising it was hardy — which, this far north, is exactly the claim you can't take on faith.
Where it began
One yard, drawn to scale, then handed to everyone else.
The first version of this was a single editable site plan for one front yard in Minnetonka, Minnesota — a real lawn, a real argument about whether a maple belonged near the front walk or off the corner of the garage. It was built as hand-drawn-style SVG in one HTML file: no framework, no build step, nothing to install. Open the file, move a tree, save.
That one plan turned out to be the useful part. So it got generalized: the same editor, but pointed at any yard, backed by a catalog built for this climate. The colored-pencil look stayed on purpose. A planting plan should be something you'd be glad to tape to the garage wall and mark up with a pencil, not a spreadsheet you close and forget.
Everything still runs in one file in your browser, with no account and no upload. That constraint shaped the whole thing.
Why cold-climate first
The catalog is tuned for the cold it grew up in.
The library is curated for the North because that's the yard it came from. Starting national and generic would have been easier. It also would have been less honest, because cold-hardy plant lists are exactly where bad advice does the most damage — a tree that sails through a Tennessee winter can be a dead stick in Minnetonka by April.
So the numbers are meant to be checkable, not decorative. North Wind®, one of the Iseli Jack Frost® hybrids, is documented hardy to roughly −30°F. That's a claim you can go verify with a nursery or an extension office, not a slogan printed on a tag.
Four seasons, the way the plan recolors them — including the winter most lists skip.
What's true today
The honest inventory of what works the moment you open it.
No vapor on this page. These features are in your hands right now, running entirely in the browser.
Works today
- The scale editor: place, drag, swap plants in real feet
- Draw and reshape beds — mulch, stone, or turf
- Move the property line and trace an aerial-photo underlay
- Dimension lines, a title block, zone and a scale bar
- A keyed plant schedule — proposed T1, T2; existing E1, E2
- A growing cold-climate library with search and filters
- Four-season recolor across the whole plan
- A growth scrubber: Today, +5, +10, +20, Mature
- Export PNG / SVG / JSON and import JSON back in
- Auto-save to your browser — no account needed
The roadmap
What's next, then, and later.
An alpha earns trust by being clear about the order of operations. Here's the order.
Next
Finish the written care guidance. The Planting, Pruning, Watering, and Design tabs already exist in each plant's detail view — the words don't yet, and that's the gap to close first. Then backfill the photos and nursery and extension links on the newest plants.
Then
Cloud save, accounts, and sharing. Today a plan lives in this browser's localStorage and nowhere else; the next step is being able to keep it somewhere safer and hand it to someone. Alongside that, a layout that works on a phone or tablet out in the yard.
Later
More regions and zones beyond the Upper Midwest, as demand and opportunity grow. Rough cost and material estimates, so a plan can carry a number. And, further out, possible soil and drainage layers — the part of a yard you can't see from above.
Get involved
It's open, and it's better with company.
Send a note to hello@plottingplants.com. If something breaks, tell us. If a cultivar belongs in the library — or a number on an existing one is wrong — say so. Plant suggestions, zone notes, and bug reports from gardeners who know their own ground are all welcome.
The catalog gets better the more cold-climate growers push back on it.
Open the sheet
See where the story goes in your own yard.
It opens to a working plan you can edit or clear. Nothing to install, nothing to sign.