Most food forests in New Zealand are planted from enthusiasm, not from a plan. A tree here, a guild there, a row of comfrey wherever there’s space. It works — eventually — but it takes years longer than a well-designed system, and the mistakes are expensive in both time and money.
Professional food forest designers know that the plan is everything. What goes in the canopy sets the conditions for every layer below it. Get the N-fixers right and you feed the whole system. Get the spacing wrong and you’re managing competition for a decade.
The Food Forest Layer Visualizer brings professional-level planning to any grower — for free.
What you can do in under 10 minutes:
- Hit 🌿 Example Fill — see a complete three-line syntropic food forest with NZ plants across all seven layers, instantly
- Clear it and start your own — choose your canopy trees first, drop them onto the cross-section view
- Switch to Aerial View, generate your syntropic planting lines, name them (“N-Fixer Row”, “Fruit Guild”, “Nurse Line”)
- Add understory, shrub, herbaceous, ground cover, root, and vine plants around your canopy
- 💾 Save your design as a file — come back and keep refining it over days or weeks
- Export a printable PNG of both views — a cross-section and an overhead map — and take it to the nursery or share with your team
Built for NZ conditions:
Over 200 plants in the database, all selected for New Zealand food forest and syntropic installs. Every plant shows its mature height, mature spread, and syntropic role — N-fixer, dynamic accumulator, chop-and-drop species, pioneer, or productive layer plant.
Shift+click to select groups. Alt+drag to duplicate a whole guild along a row. Click any line label to rename it. The tool is packed with features that serious designers will reach for immediately.
Whether you’re planning a quarter-acre home food forest or a multi-hectare syntropic system, this tool gives you a visual foundation to design from — not just plant from.
Free. No account. Open in any browser. Save your work locally.
👉 Open the Food Forest Layer Visualizer and start your plan