I presented this topic back in December 2019at the Landscape Architecture Construction International Conference - Design and Construction with Information at the School of Architecture, Tsinghua University with a set of Autodesk Dynamo scripts and as Autodesk Civil 3D add-in. After some discussion with colleagues, I shifted to developing a Revit family with a focus on BIM capabilities (clash detection of envelope and roots) and the dynamic character of plants (growth).
The prototype was tested by students in several courses teaching Revit by Prof. Petschek at the Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences (OST) and by Dominik Nauroth in his bachelor thesis. The prototype includes a set of generic trees for early design stages and about 30 commonly used trees, including nursery stock information provided by Jardin Suisse. From the feedback, I improved the trees in functionality and useability. We also successfully tested a rendering pipeline, especially with linking assets from the Revit Enscape plugin