4.6 Create GardenCAD Symbols

This project involves making CAD versions of your plant symbols.  Although there are >100 symbols in gardenCAD, we would encourage you to create your own planting and other symbols rather than rely on ours. If you do make your own symbols, you will have these personalised symbols at your disposal; that's how you stamp your own personality into your CAD designs.

Trace hand drawn symbols

It is a relatively simple matter to make CAD versions of the plant symbols that you have developed by hand. For example, the symbol shown in the figure below can be traced rather easily using GardenCAD.

We simply open GardenCAD, use the Insert>Raster tool, place the image into the drawing editor and then drew over the top, using the image as a guide.

Here is a link to a movie showing how it is done.

The figure below shows that we have been able to apply colour to the symbol (using the hatch command).

Here  is a link to a movie showing how we applied colour to the new symbol.

GardenCAD's own symbols

It's worth getting to know the symbols in GardenCAD and these are shown in the figures below. Some of the symbols here have been drawn by past students and have now been incorporated into our GardenCAD Pro software. We would hope that your symbols get incorporated too.

Symbol Group 1:

Symbol Group 2:

Symbol Group 3.

Symbol Group 4.

Symbol Group 5:

Creating your own symbols - the GardenCAD symbol standard

If you would like to make your symbols work with the native GardenCAD symbols, you need to follow the instructions set out below.

 Tip: Make sure that you know how to make a layer current. You will want to move to a layer, (say L-PLNT-SYMBOL) and change the drawing colour to an appropriate shade of green or whatever to indicate the plant species that you are designing for. You need to be able to switch back to drawing by layer when you have finished this.

Start by drawing a CIRCLE centred at Cartesian coordinate 0,0 on layer L-PLNT-CONSTRUCTION with a canopy diameter of 1000 units (radius 500 units). Draw another circle on the same layer with a radius of 15 units as the central indicator. Do not use a cross for this as the cross will be in an awkward position after a rotate. We recommend setting the line thickness of each circle to 0.5mm so the position of each new species stands out when plotted.

Now work on layer L-PLNT-SYMBOL

Here different colours are commonly used along with the PLINE (Polyline) command. We often use the PLINE command to trace around the approximate circumference of the circle (using the circle on the L-CONSTRUCTION layer as a guide and then use the PEDIT (Properties in gardenCAD) command to change the 'fluidity' of the shape. This gives us a symbol which we can use to show the client a rough draft of the design - the full high coloured version comes next. In contrast to the circles on the construction layer, keep the line thicknesses here quite fine (certainly less than 0.5 mm).

Next you might use the PLINE command in combination with the HATCH command to make small highly coloured blocks (canopy1, canopy2 etc.). Stamp these into the drawing on this new layer. You might care to make a group coloured ligher and place these in the 0-90 degree arc to give the appearance of sun shining on the symbol.

Draw a couple of branches and make these into blocks (branch1, branch2 etc.) Stamp these over the circle to make the shape. Test the symbol both on the screen and when plotted to paper. Save the symbol in your own block library.

Here are some examples:

Although we recommend making each new block according to our standard procedure, there are times when you will want to deviate from it. Here we discuss making a block (symbol) suitable for indicating the presence of a Buxus hedge row.

Click this link to play a movie showing the use of such a symbol.