Find your way around the canvas

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.

2. Switch to Edit

Nothing on the canvas changes until you leave View for Edit in the top bar. The left tool rail appears with it, and the bar's own wash turns from green to clay, so the mode you are in is readable without hunting for the switch.

3. Pan and zoom

Drag empty canvas to push the view along; scroll or pinch to zoom. 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%. Lost your plot off-screen? The fit-to-view control re-centres the whole garden in one tap.

4. Select, move, undo

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, and esc or a click on empty canvas lets everything go. Drag any selection to move it, ⌫ deletes, and ⌘Z undoes anything, so it's safe to experiment.

Alt takes everything standing on it Dragging a bed moves the bed and nothing else. Hold ⌥ Option (Alt on Windows) while you drag and the plants, the objects, the fences and any beds drawn inside it all travel with it. It is the difference between moving a border and moving the ground under it.

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, keeping only a small handle at the trunk, which means a click under a faded tree reaches whatever is there: the small plant standing under it, or the bed itself.

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.

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.