Help

1.About Easyscape

Easyscape is focused on helping people grow plants that are easy on our planet. And the plants that are the easiest are those that are native to your location. They usually require little or no additional water, usually grow more reliably, and they almost always do the best job of supporting native biodiversity - especially native bird life and pollinators. To help you find the right plants for your garden, we’ve mapped out the estimated native ranges of over 13,000 plants across the entire globe. Now anyone on earth can type in their address and see a list of their native plants, and even use our advanced search to select the best ones for your garden.

While we are strong proponents of native plants, we know that most people that plant natives in their gardens plant a mix of true natives, drought tolerant non-natives, and other non-natives that may need additional irrigation to survive.

We provide search tools to help you find the right plants in all three categories, to create your plantlist, and finally to turn your plantlist into a garden design.

2.Find Plants

From either the home page, or the search page, enter your address or city name, and we’ll show your list of native plants, your list of drought tolerant plants and all appropriate landscaping plants for your location.

Your Native Plants. These are the plants that are native to the square mile in which your address is located.

Your Drought Tolerant Plants. These “Low Water” plants tolerate the minimum and maximum temperatures of your location, and once established, should survive entirely on normal rainfall.

All Your Landscaping Plants. These “Hardy” plants tolerate the minimum and maximum temperatures of your location, and tolerate the maximum rainfall of your location, but may require additional irrigation to survive.

From the search page, you can also filter each of these categories by detailed plant characteristics (i.e., plant type, size, flower color, flowering season, common use, etc.). Click on Matching Plants to see all plants that match your criteria. Click on the map location point which represents your address to see the high temp, cold temp, precipitation and elevation of the address).

Plant results are shown in thumbnail grids of 100 plant thumbnails per page. Use the options in the thumbnail results page to sort by popularity, common name or scientific name.

If you leave the thumbnail results page, click on the Browse button to return to the thumbnail view.

3.Plant Pages

Click on any thumbnail in the results page to go to the detailed plant pages. You can also go directly to the plant pages from the search page, by typing in any scientific or common plant name.

Plant Maps. Each plant page shows a map of the estimated native range of that plant down to the square mile level. The maps are based on GBIF observation shared by hundreds of botanical institutions around the world. Easyscape first codes wild observations inside the general geographic area in which the plant is known to be native as “native observations”. Observations outside the general geographic area in which the plant is known to be native are coded as non-native and are not shown in our maps.

Sources for information regarding general geographic native range include Wikipedia, BONAP and Kew Gardens. Once all known plant observations are coded as either native or non-native, we algorithmically include as part of the plant’s native range all square miles that are near a native observation AND are within the high and low temperature ranges, the precipitation range, and the altitude range that the plant is known to grow in the nearby area.

In all maps, native observations are shown as blue dots and estimated native ranges are shown as yellow polygons. Zoomed out, the observations are shown in clusters, but if you zoom in, you can see the individual plant observations.

About Text. The “About” section text in most plant pages includes information from Wikipedia. All text in the About section, including Easyscape additions, is licensed and reusable under Creative Commons license (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Photos. All plant photos in all plant pages, including all Easyscape photos, are licensed and reusable under a Creative Commons CC BY-SA or similar license, or are public domain. Thanks to the photographers of Wikipedia Commons, Flickr, i-Naturalist, CalPhotos, PlantNet and the Atlas of Living Australia for allowing reuse of many of the photos in their collections. Photographer names and license type are shown at the bottom of each photo. Click on either link to see full licensing information for that photo.

4.Create Your Plantlist

Just click on “Add to Plantlist” in the thumbnail results or the plant pages to add a plant to your custom plantlist. You can view your plantlist in the plantlist pane on the right side of the Browse and Design page, or in the entire Plant List page.

In the Design page, your plantlist will also act as the key for adding plants into your garden design.

General Plantlist Options. Access the general plantlist options by clicking on the options icon to the right of the plantlist title.

• Clear Plantlist (if you want to start from scratch. Note this will clear any plants that may have been added to your design as well)
• Clear Unused Plants (that have not been placed in a garden design.)
• Add Custom Plant (this will allow you to add a plant that is not in our database to your custom plantlist)
• Sort Plantlist (by popularity, scientific name or common name)
• Save to Plantlist Library (this will allow you to reuse this particular plantlist)
• Open Plantlist Library (this will allow you to open, edit, or delete your previously saved plantlists)
• Share Plantlist (use this to create a link and copy of your plantlist to share with someone)
• Export to Spreadsheet (this will download an Excel spreadsheet of your plantlist)

Plant Icon Options. In addition to the main plantlist options, you can click on the three dots next to any plant you have added to your plantlist, and see these options…

• Edit Plant Icon (this will allow you to change the name of the plant, the icon shape, the icon color, or the icon size). Note that if you change the characteristics of a given plant icon, the changes will be applied to all previous and future placements of that plant)
• Go to plant page (this will take you to the normal Easyscape plant page)
• Remove from Plantlist (this will remove the plant from that plantlist and will remove all placements of that plant from your design)
• Quick Info (this will provide quick summary information for the plant in a popup)

5.Design Garden

The design garden page allows you to create a garden design based on the plants in your plantlist.

• Add Plant. The most important feature in the Design Garden page is the ability to add plants to your design. This feature allows you to place accurately sized plants in the spots that you want them in your design. To make it easy to keep track of which plant is which, each placed plant will show the same number and same icon shape and color as the highlighted plant in the plantlist.
  
  All icons are sized according to their estimated width and range from widths of over 100 feet for large trees, down < 1 foot for small annuals. Each icon will be scaled accordingly as you zoom in and out of your design. Note that you can edit the icon width (or color, shape or size) of any plant icon if you wish by clicking on the three dots next to any plant record in the plantlist.
  
  Click on the number inside the plant icon to remove that placement from your design. Drag and drop an icon by grabbing any part of it to adjust its location in the garden design. When you want to add a different plant, just click on a different plant in the plantlist pane, and each new cursor click on the map will add that new plant.
  
  Note that each time you add a plant to your garden design, the count of the total number of plants in your design, and the count for the plant you’ve just added, will increment by 1. This is an easy way to be able to tell how many plants you will need to buy from your local nursery, in total, and by each species.
• Enter Address. To create a design, first enter your address and it will zoom into the map of your property with a detailed view of that location. The default view shows satellite imagery as the background map, but users in the US, Canada and Australia can upgrade to ultra high-quality aerial maps for their property for $20/year. Click on the Download button to purchase this vivid upgraded background map.
• Draw Shape. To draw shapes and lines in your design, click the “draw shape” icon, and then select either Curved Line, Straight Line, Polygon or Curved Shape in the dropdown. Then click on the locations in the map where you want your line segment or shape vertices to be placed. The lines or curves will be drawn automatically between each vertex. You can drag and drop and vertex to adjust the shapes or lines while you are drawing them. To finish drawing, simply click on the first vertex you added, which will have a dot in the middle of it.
• Paint. Once you have drawn your shapes, it can be helpful to differentiate them by painting them with different semi-transparent colors. To do so, click on the paint can icon, and then select the color you want to paint with in the color wheel popup. Then click the shape in the design that you want to paint, and it will fill with the selected color. In the case that one shape is entirely inside another shape, only the most recently added shape will be filled.
• Add Text. To add text to your design, select the text icon to set the cursor state to “text”, and then click on the spot on the map where you want to add the text.
• Select Mode. Clicking on the “Select Mode” (finger) icon allows you to click on any previously placed object in your design to return it to edit mode, so you can edit or delete it.

General Design Garden Options. Access the general “Design Garden” options by clicking on the options icon just to the left of the garden design title.

• Enter Garden Address. you can use this option or the option in the main map to select the address you want to use for building your design
• New Design. This will save your current design and start a new blank design with a new name. It will not clear out the old plantlist though, so you can reuse your previous plantlist if you like. If you wish to clear out the old plantlist, click “Clear Plantlist” from the plantlist options.
• Open Design. This will allow you to open, edit, or delete any previously saved designs.
• Save Design As. This will allow you to create a copy of your current design and save using whatever title you wish. Note that all new designs are auto saved, so you never have to use the Save Design As option unless you want to make a copy of the design using a different name.
• Delete Design. This will allow you to delete any previously saved garden designs.
• Share Design. This will allow you to share your design with friends.
• Background Map. Select either aerial, street, or blank background maps for your design. Users in the US, Canada and Australia will also have the option to access ultra- high quality aerial background maps for their property $20 per year.

6.My Account

Click on the My Account Icon in the upper right corner of any page to sign in to (or create) your Easyscape account. If you are signed in, all designs and plantlists are automatically saved to your account, so you can easily access them at any time from any device.

Easyscape keeps all information completely confidential. User information is never shared with third parties, and cookies are solely used to allow the site to function properly. To see more details, please go to easyscape.com/privacy.

If you upgrade your garden map, you’ll have access to an ultra-high aerial background map for your property for 1 year. You’ll be able to view your upgrade period start and end date from the My Account icon. Map upgrades are not auto-renewed, but you can easily repurchase after the initial upgrade period has expired.