Skip to Content

4.4 Plant Symbols in Plan & Elevation

We would like you to stretch your knowledge and ability to use GardenCAD by asking you to 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.

The figure below shows an example; we have created a symbol which would work well to indicate the position of a Star Jasmine climber. The symbol closely matches the GardenCAD standard (see 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.

Star jasmine

Then we drew a representation of the plant in elevation view.

Elevation

Then an image(s) of the plant 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).

StarJasmine

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.

Plan&Elevation

and 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.

Scale bar

Make a hand drawn version of your plan view of the symbol (drawing class?) and scan it back into GardenCAD.

Of course, we would like you to share the symbols with other GardenCAD users; it's your choice.

Steps to take when creating you own symbol

  1. We have provided a list of 60 plant species below - 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.

A list of 60 plant names - botanical names and common names

  1. Research and obtain as much information about the chosen species as possible - libraries (books), the Internet can all be used. It is important to focus on local information.
  2. 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.
  3. Armed with this information, start GardenCAD.
  4. 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]
  5. 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.
  6. Switch back to layer L-PLNT-SYMBOL
  7. Now draw the essence of your design in plan view.
  8. Now an elevation view
  9. Then use the MTEXT option to write a paragraph about this plant species.
  10. Add a photograph(s) of the plant. If you can, a habit photo and a close up of the flower.
  11. Finally a scale bar (unlike the example above, make a bar with meter steps, not half meter).


Theme by Dr. Radut.