Plan Your Food Forest Before You Plant a Single Tree

There’s a moment every aspiring food forest designer knows well. You’re standing in a paddock — or staring at a blank section — with a head full of plants, guilds, and ideas, but no clear picture of how they fit together. Which trees go where? Will the canopy shade out the understory? Are the root crops in the right zone? Where does the kōwhai sit relative to the fruit guild?

Planning on paper is hard. Planning in your head is harder. Planting wrong and waiting five years to find out is hardest of all.

That’s why we built the Food Forest Layer Visualizer — a free, browser-based planning tool for New Zealand food forest and syntropic agroforestry installs.

Open the Food Forest Layer Visualizer

What is it?

The Food Forest Layer Visualizer is an interactive design tool that lets you plan, visualise, and arrange your food forest before you pick up a spade. It runs in your web browser — no installation, no account, no subscription.

You get two complementary views:

• Side view — a cross-section from canopy (80–100 ft) down through understory, shrub, herbaceous, ground cover, and root layers into the soil
• Aerial view — a top-down map of syntropic planting lines and mature canopy spread, drawn to scale on a 10 ft grid

Together, these views help you see your food forest in three dimensions.

Built for New Zealand

Most food forest resources target the northern hemisphere. This tool was built for New Zealand growers.

The database includes 200+ plants for NZ food forest and syntropic installs, across all seven layers:

• Canopy — native podocarps (rimu, tōtara, kahikatea, puriri), N-fixing canopy trees, and productive fruit and nut species (chestnut, pecan, walnut, macadamia, avocado, heritage apple, feijoa)
• Understory — loquat, fig, pawpaw, tamarillo, olive, pomegranate, plus natives such as kōwhai, māhoe, and kawakawa
• Shrub — hazelnut, blueberry, harakeke, mānuka, kānuka, goji, Chilean guava, pigeon pea, tree lupin
• Herbaceous — comfrey, yarrow, nettle, valerian, borage, puha, watercress
• Ground cover — clovers, creeping thyme, strawberry, nasturtium, dichondra, pratia
• Root — kūmara, taro, uwhi, daikon, burdock, oca, yacon, mashua
• Vine — kiwifruit, boysenberry, hops, table grapes, passionfruit, native climbers

Each plant includes mature height, mature width, and syntropic notes.

Key features

Syntropic line planning

Plan in lines — the syntropic approach. In aerial view, generate rows with custom spacing, choose guild templates (Succession Line, N-Fixer Guild, Fruit Guild, Pioneer Line), and label lines on the canvas (“Kōwhai Guild”, “Riparian Edge”, “Chop-Drop Row”).

Accurate scale

Plants are drawn at mature size. Side view uses height grids in feet; aerial view shows full canopy spread on a 10 ft grid — so you can see shading conflicts before you plant.

Synced views

Plants exist in both views at once. Add or move in one view; the other updates. No duplicate editing.

Drag-and-drop

Click to place, drag to reposition. Shift+click for multi-select. Alt+drag to duplicate a plant or guild. Delete removes selections.

Example fill

Hit Example Fill to populate three complete syntropic lines with random NZ plants — a realistic starter layout you can explore or adapt.

Save and load

Save your design as a .json file. Load it later — every plant and label restored.

Export to PNG

Export high-resolution PNG images of side and aerial views, with plant names and line labels — for printing, nurseries, or records.

Custom plants

Add any species not in the list — name, height, and width — straight onto the canvas.

Who is this for?

• Home growers planning a first food forest
• Permaculture designers sketching guilds for clients
• Syntropic practitioners visualising succession lines and spacing
• Regenerative farmers converting paddocks to food forests
• Schools and education programmes — visual, interactive, and free

How to get started

1. Hit Example Fill to see a complete layered forest
2. Hit Clear All and build your own
3. Choose a layer and click plants to place them
4. Switch to Aerial View for syntropic lines and guild names
5. Save when you’re happy — return anytime

Click Help inside the tool for a full feature guide.

Free, open, and built with care

Built by growers, for growers. Free to use, browser-only — your design stays on your computer in your saved .json file.

Good planning tools should be accessible — from a quarter-acre section to larger syntropic conversions.

Plant better. Plan first.

Try the Food Forest Layer Visualizer

Troppo · Kai resilience · NZ Edible Ecosystem Planner