Every landscape designer creates specific species lists for their various projects. Species from the list are chosen for their ability to grow well at the site in question and possess features that will enhance the design. Lists are usually drawn from personal experience gained over many years and are part of a landscape designer’s intellectual property, so they are a valuable resource. Designers keep plant lists in many forms- from paper lists to reference books and sophisticated online databases that require purchasing and installing software.
Plant lists in gCADPlus
Our gCADPlus software has a built-in list feature that allows designers to attach an electronic list to each CAD drawing. These lists are simple text files that can act as plant data files and assist significantly in plant selection. The files have the extension .gcp and the same text file and can be used over many drawings if required.
Tip: Many landscape design studios store a standard list on a computer in their office network and share that pooled list over many design jobs.
An overview of the use of plant database files in the gCADPlus environment.
Attach a list
The first step in generating a plant schedule is to attach a plant database file to the drawing. Visit the gCADPlus drop-down menu and select the ‘Attach a gcp’ file option.
The figure below shows a typical plant database file ‘floating’ above the drawing in its window.
Column order, spell check a list
Note the column order: Botanical Name, Common Name, Type, Code, PotSize, Cost and Custom.
Tip: While the names of the columns can be changed, the order must stay the same. If not, the automated plant schedule and labelling tools in gCADPlus will not work correctly. You can add extra columns, e.g., height and width, but these must be added at the end of the table.
These plant data files are simple text lists and have the extension .gcp. The list can be a shortlist suited to one site only or a much longer list containing all the designer’s favourite plant species. When first loaded, the database file is sorted by alphabetical plant name in the first column, but you can, for example, sort on Type just by clicking at the top of a column.
Here is a small movie illustration of using a plant list in the gCADPlus environment. Once created and loaded into the drawing editor, there is a quick way to tag individual plant symbols and generate plant schedules. However, as demonstrated in this video, the databases can be customized and expanded to match your design team’s preferred approach to plant selection. We also highlight the benefits of storing links to photos of the species used in a design, allowing for an easily accessible page of photos to be presented to the client.
Spellcheck inside a plant list
Note the red underlining in species names in the list above. This indicates potential mis-spelling of the botanical name.
If gCADPlus sees a word in your plant list that it does not hold in its dictionary (or suspects that it is misspelled), it is highlighted in red. To add the word, hover over the underlined word, right-click with the mouse and select ‘add the word’.
Tip: If you have chosen a word with special characters like quotation marks, remove those before adding the word to the dictionary.
We cannot over-emphasize the value of learning to use the plant list effectively. Some designers have comprehensive lists of several hundred species with information on text code, pot size, flowering time, flower colour landscape use, etc. That enables them (with the aid of the sorting facility) to find a species for a particular use in a landscape plan.