We would like you to stretch your knowledge and ability to use GardenCAD by asking you to produce a fact sheet on one species that you intend working with in the practice of your profession. In doing so, you will design a GardenCAD symbol of your own.
As you move on to creating designs for clients you will need to set yourself apart from others and give your CAD drawings some personality of their own. Creating your own symbols is one way to do this.
Let's begin
The figure below shows an example of a symbol. This is a symbol to indicate the position of a Star Jasmine climber. The symbol closely matches the GardenCAD standard (see the published standard on http://www.gardencad.net), but has been drawn 1000 units wide and 300 mm deep to simulate the area covered by this climbing species. In a plan drawing, you would place the symbol along a fence line.
While still in the sae GardenCAD drawing, we drew a representation of the plant in elevation view.
Then we made sure that we had a image(s) of the plant in our photolibrary that we had taken with our own camera. Even though the plant was not in flower, it is our image and there are no issues with copyright. We can use it as part of our portfolio.
We ask that in addition to drawing the plant in plan view, you draw an elevation view, add a photograph of the plant, an MTEXT description (paragraph or two) about the species as shown below.
You should add a scale bar (shown below). The scale bar can live with the drawing and will always give an accurate representation of distance in the design, no matter how much photocopying and reduction takes place.
Congratulations, you have made a fact sheet with a symbol that's unique to you. You might like to store the plan and elevation views in the GardenCAD blocks folder (as separate files) ready for use as a symbol in any job that you do.
Of course, we would like you to share the symbols with other GardenCAD users; it's your choice. We would love to upload it to the download space in gardencad.net
Steps to take when creating your own symbol
It is often difficult to settle on a plant species to make a representative symbol. We have provided a link to list of 60 plant species below. The list contains botanical names (and common names where possible). Choose a plant from from list (or substitute one of your own). If you choose a plant species of your own, please choose one that you know grows locally.
Download a list of 60 plant names in PDF format - print off if required.
- Research and obtain as much information about the chosen species as possible - Libraries (books), the Internet and lecturing staff can all be sources of useful information. Remember that it is important to focus on local information.
- Produce a quick hand drawn sketch of a plan view of the species which distills from the plant some element that characterises the plant. This might be an arching branchlet, a splash of one or more colours, a trunk texture etc. It is important that you do not try and get a photorealistic interpretation of the plant - it's the essence of the plant we want. A photograph of the plant is the real key to distilling the essence of the plant - we want a representation.
- Armed with this information, start GardenCAD.
- Make several layers on which elements of the symbol will be drawn. [We follow the international layer naming convention so make the layers L-PLNT-SYMBOL, L-PLNT-CONSTRUCTION, L-PLNT-ELEVATION]
- Set layer L-CONSTRUCTION as current and draw a circle of radius 500 units (mm) at 0,0 - this provides a guide for future work.
- Switch back to layer L-PLNT-SYMBOL
- Now draw the essence of your design in plan view.
- Now an elevation view
- Then use the MTEXT option to write a paragraph about this plant species.
- Add a photograph(s) of the plant. If you can, a habit photo and a close up of the flower.
- Finally a scale bar (unlike the example above, make a bar with meter steps, not half meter).
