While many of Revit’s site tools can be disappointingly limited (or even nonexistent), planting plans are one of the things that make the program worthwhile.

Planting plans can get very intensive, so I’ve broken them down into three levels of complexity, starting with the most basic, which can be done with standard, out-of-the-box Revit.

The most basic planting plan is done by placing individual plants, tagging, and scheduling them. The default Revit plant famillies are RPC. I have heard some complaints about this, since some people prefer actual 3D trees, but from my experience 3D trees bog programs down quickly, so I am quite fine with them and we use RPC plants for all our individual plants.

This is what the default red ash looks like, in realistic and ray trace mode.

Now, Revit’s planting tools haven’t been improved since they were first created so the default plant is not equipped the the right parameters. But most of these default parameters can actually be used (not as intended) for your planting purposes. To demonstrate I’ve made a planting schedule below with available parameters:

To the untrained eye these parameters might not make much sense, but by simply renaming them, your schedule can then look like this:

Obviously my Type needs to be renamed, but you get the idea. The same can also be applied to Tags. There are only two instance parameters to choose from here: Mark and Comments. I prefer to use Comments for actual comments, but Mark will give you annoying errors when there are duplicates. Either could be used.

By adding Mark into the Tag Label, your planting tag can now look like this:

Most of this process was an elaborate work-around, which is useful to know about, but I wouldn’t recommend it if you are serious about planting plans.  Continue reading in Part 2