Green areas, trees & woodland

Landscaping is part of the scheme, not an afterthought. Green areas influence the layout, and everything you place renders in 3D.

Green area (🌳)

The Green area tool draws public open space. Choose the kind from the selector: grass, shrubs (mixed or flowering) or hedge (clipped or natural). The generator keeps plots out of green areas, and you can set an overall green-space target with the cycler slider.

Trees (🌲)

The Trees tool places procedural 3D trees. Pick a species — Oak, Rowan, Silver birch, Pine, Poplar, Cherry — or choose Woodland area and set a density to fill a region with mixed trees. Trees appear in 2D plan and in 3D.

With the tool still active, clicking on a tree picks that tree up rather than planting a second one on top of it: move it, turn it with [ and ], resize it, or remove it with Delete. Click anywhere that is not a tree and you plant a new one as usual. Esc puts down the tree in hand; a second Esc finishes with the tool.

How a woodland chooses its species Pro

With the plant database to hand, a woodland area is not filled from a fixed list: every position is given the species that passes the planting checks at that spot — the same checks that would otherwise raise a finding afterwards.

A wood is held to different figures from a street tree, because the two are different things. The 10-20-30 guide (no more than 10% one species, 20% one genus) comes from Santamour and is about the tree population a town plants, so that one pest cannot take out a large share of it; the councils that adopt it say so in terms. A woodland is held instead to the UK Forestry Standard’s figure: no more than 65% of one species (UKFS 5th edition, Good Forestry Practice Requirement 21 — a “should”, and stated over a whole forest management unit rather than one stand, so applying it to a single wood is our own reading). UKFS gives no genus figure, so a wood has no genus cap.

Woodland is also native first: where the database holds natives, a wood is planted from them. A spot where no native passes the checks — too close to a house, say — is left empty and reported, rather than filled with a non-native. For the same reason, woodland trees are left out of the diversity check on the rest of the scheme, and that finding says how many were excluded.

Naming an area

Click the label on any landscaped area or water body to rename it — leave it blank to go back to the default (GRASS, SHRUBS, HEDGE, and so on). The same box carries Scale with the drawing:

• Off (the default) — the text stays the same size on screen however far you zoom. Always readable, but it does not grow with the plan.
• On — the text is a fixed size on the ground, about 2 m tall, so it grows as you zoom in and sits in proportion to the scheme, the way plot numbers do. It will not shrink below a legible size when you zoom out.

The same box carries Show label. Turn it off and the area keeps its name — the schedules and the appraisal still use it — but nothing is drawn on the plan, in a sketch view, on a sheet or in any export. A hidden label shows as a faint ghost while its own area is selected in Edit, so there is still something to click to switch it back on; it is never drawn in a DXF recording or an issued sheet, where nothing is selected to show it for.