Find your way around the canvas
Before you build anything, get comfortable moving around. Pan, zoom, read the grid and learn how selection works, the moves you'll repeat in every single lesson.
1. Read the scaled grid
The faint grid is a real-world ruler. The Grid control at the bottom sets how fine it is: 1 means one-metre squares, 0.5 is 50 cm, 0.25 is 25 cm. Pick a finer grid for detailed beds. Your areas and plants snap to it as you draw, so a 4 m bed reads as exactly 4 m, not just 'about this big'.
Grid is the last cell in a fixed row of display pills in the canvas’s bottom-right corner: Shortcuts, Footprint, Labels, Depth, then Grid and its spacing options. The row is there in View mode as well as Edit, because these change what the canvas shows rather than what you can change about the garden. Footprint, Labels and Depth also sit, with fuller descriptions, under Settings → Canvas display; the pill and the switch write one per-garden setting, so they can never disagree.
2. Enter Edit and select
Switch View to Edit in the top bar and the left tool rail appears. Pick the Select tool, then click any area or plant to pick it up. Selected items get a clay outline that traces their real shape, never a generic box. Just pointing at something draws that same ring broken into dashes, so a dashed ring means you are hovering and a solid one means it is selected. A darker dashed circle around a plant is a different thing entirely: that is the Mature footprint ring, which is off unless you switch it on. ⇧ Shift-click to grab several at once.
Tip Press Esc or click empty canvas to deselect everything.
3. Move things with the mouse
Drag any selection to move it. Dragging an area moves just that area, hold ⌥ Option (Alt on Windows) as you drag to take everything planted inside it along too. Hit ⌫ to delete, and ⌘Z undoes anything, so it's safe to experiment.
4. Zoom and pan
Scroll or pinch to zoom; drag empty canvas to pan. The zoom read-out beside the ± buttons writes a camera-style multiplier, from 0.5× out to 14.0×, always with one decimal so the × does not jump about as you step through. Click it and type the multiplier you want: 3 lands on 3.0×, and an old-habit 200 clamps to the 14.0× maximum rather than meaning 200%. Use it to swing between a whole-garden overview and close-up planting work.
The read-out is a multiplier Zoom runs from 0.5× to 14.0×, always with one decimal so the × does not jump as you step through. Click it and type the multiplier you want: 3 lands on 3.0×, and an old-habit 200 simply clamps to the maximum.
Tip Lost your plot off-screen? The fit-to-view control re-centres the whole garden in one tap.
5. Zoom in and the canopy steps back
Zooming does something else as well. As you go in, trees fall back to a faint ghost first and shrubs follow, so a drift of hostas under a cherry stops being hidden by it and becomes the subject of the view. Nothing ever disappears: every plant keeps at least a quarter of its opacity, so the canopy is still there as context. Below about half opacity a canopy also stops catching your pointer, which means a click under a faded tree reaches the small plant beneath it.
Pointing at a plant pulls back anything larger standing over it, and selecting one holds that canopy back while you move across to the right-hand panel. A tree with nothing underneath never fades itself, because there would be nothing to reveal.
Turning it off Depth fading is on by default. The Depth pill on the canvas bottom bar switches it, in View or Edit mode, as does Depth fading under Settings → Canvas display. Both write the same per-garden setting, and exports are never faded.