This is the lesson everyone skips ahead to, and it is much easier than it looks because you already know the gesture. Putting a plant in the ground uses the same slider, the same geometries, and the same keys as drawing a bed did in Lesson two. All that changes is the mode. What is genuinely new here is that there are four different ways to fill ground and they suit different situations: placing single plants where position matters, drawing an area and letting the editor space them for you, making one shaped patch that stands for a hedge or a canopy or a sown bed, and handing the whole job to the guided planter, which reads your queue and lays it out across whichever beds you select. You can mix all four in one garden, and most real plans do.

Three objectives. First, you will be able to place plants by hand: a single plant of the active species with the place-plant tool, or an area you draw which the editor fills at that species' spacing. Second, you will be able to use the Individual and Patch dial that appears when you draw an area, and say what each setting produces: Individual scatters separate spaced plants you can move one at a time, while Patch makes one managed region carrying a count. You will also know the trick of setting a patch count to one, which is how a hedge, a tree canopy, or a sprawling squash is drawn as a single shaped plant. Third, you will be able to run the guided planter, which takes the queue you built in the last lesson and distributes it across the beds you have selected.

The dial that appears when you draw a planting area is the thing worth understanding here. Individual means the editor scatters separate plants across the area you drew, spaced according to the species, and each one is its own object you can select, move, or delete. That is what you want for a bed of lettuces where the exact positions matter and you might shuffle them. Patch means the whole area becomes one managed object carrying a count, which is what you want for a sown bed of carrots where the individual positions are fiction anyway. And then there is the case people do not expect: set a patch count to one, and you have a single plant whose drawn shape is its own footprint. That is how you draw a hedge along a boundary, a mature tree canopy, or a squash that will cover two square metres by August.

Five steps covering both routes. First, set the slider to Plant. Second, confirm the active species in the rail, because everything you are about to place inherits it and changing it afterwards is more work than changing it now. Third, for a single plant, take the place-plant tool with P and click where it goes. Fourth, for a bed, draw an area with any geometry and the editor fills it at the species' spacing; set the Individual and Patch dial, adjust the count if you want it thinner or denser, and press Enter or the tick to commit. Fifth, for the whole plan at once, switch to the select tool, select one or more beds, and choose guided plant. The editor reads your queue and distributes the species across the beds you chose, respecting spacing and putting taller things where their shadow falls out of the garden rather than across it.

Here is the thing about the guided planter that is worth saying plainly, because it changes how much you trust it. It is not scattering plants at random inside your bed outlines. It knows the spacing of every species in your queue, so it will not put things closer than they want to be. It knows the mature height of each one, and it knows which edge of your garden the shade falls towards, because you set north in Lesson one. So it puts tall things where their own shadow lands outside the garden rather than across the beds behind them. That is a real design decision being made for you, and it is only correct because of the site setup you did at the very beginning. A guided plan on a garden with no orientation is guesswork wearing a confident face.

Four things that go wrong. People place forty plants with the wrong species active and then have to select and change every one: check the rail before you commit, not after. People fill a bed edge to edge because the tool makes it easy, and end up with a plan they cannot walk into: leave access, because a bed you cannot reach the middle of does not get weeded. People try to draw a hedge as a structure because it is long and solid, which gives them a wall that casts a hard shadow and grows nothing: it is a patch of one. And people run the guided planter, dislike one bed's result, and undo the whole thing: it works per selection, so just select that bed and run it again, or fix the few plants by hand.

Three things. Planting reuses the drawing gesture exactly, so the only thing that changed from Lesson two is the mode slider. The Individual and Patch dial is the real decision when you fill an area, and a patch with a count of one is how you draw a hedge, a tree canopy, or anything whose drawn shape is its own footprint. And guided planting is not a random scatter: it uses the spacing from the species record and the shade direction from the compass bearing you set in the first lesson, which is why the setup work at the start pays off here rather than earlier. You now have a planted garden. The next lesson goes back to that list and plants the rest of it for you, one reasoned suggestion at a time.