August Home-Garden

National Gardening Association Garden Design on Computer

by Nan Sterman

"Location, location, location," the Realtor said. "Location, location and a big yard for gardening," I thought. That was three years ago when my husband and I purchased half an acre in a semirural area of San Diego County.

For the first three years, we slowly remodeled the inside of our home. Recently, we decided we were ready to tackle the outside. The new yard is large, but that's all it has going for it. There is virtually no landscaping and very limited irrigation. The house sits on a pad six feet above the yard. A large drainage culvert lines the bottom of the lot. I've been wanting a garden but I knew better than to start without a plan, and for a project this large we needed professional guidance. I found a wonderful landscape architect, well-versed in drought-tolerant and native plants as well as in edible landscaping. She developed a basic layout and design. We put the demolition, grading, irrigation, hardscape and sod out to bid -- $40,000. Four times our budget. Ouch! If we're to relandscape, it will have to be done with our own labor, which means that we need to simplify. But the question is, how to simplify the plan without losing the feel we want? I knew landscape design programs for homeowners were becoming more sophisticated, so I decided to take a look at what's available. I scoured the computer stores and catalogs for garden design programs, and here's what I found.

3D Landscape Books That Work, 2300 Geng Rd., Building 3, Suite 100, Palo Alto, CA 94303; (800) 242-4546. Requirements and cost: Windows 3.1; 256-color video card; 4MB RAM and 15MB available on hard drive or CD-ROM and 5MB available on hard drive; $50.

Drafting a landscape plan using 3D Landscape is a time-intensive proposition. But what you get for your work is well worth the effort. 3D Landscape is a two-part product. Landscape Designer is a drafting program that enables you to draft a plan of your yard, while the How-To Guide is an electronic reference book of information and techniques.

3D Landscape provides pre-drawn, scalable symbols called "landscape objects." All of the objects reside in an on-screen "spiral notebook." I started my design by clicking the tab labeled "lot" and dragging property lines, roads and driveways onto the drawing area. I arranged and resized the objects, then clicked the "house" tab. I dragged a basic house structure onto my plan and placed windows, doors, the garage, etc. Other tabs feature trees, shrubs, plants, utilities, projects such as retaining walls and raised planting beds, and structures such as sheds and gazebos.

I created a plan of my yard as it exists, saved a copy as reference, then started my "dream" plan. I dragged raised beds into the future vegetable garden, placed a free-form patio next to the house, stretched an arbor over the patio and dragged in a pathway to surround the grass area-to- be. As with most of the objects, the pathway tool draws a rectangle, but once it was drawn, I could grab the edges at any point to pull out curves and angles.

I looked at the two-dimensional plan from the top, then shifted to a three-dimensional side view and added the contours of my yard using the slope utility. I placed generic plants, then linked them to specific plants in 3D Landscape's plant library. Few of the plants I needed were in the library, so I left some as generic vines, grasses and shrubs. I aged the landscape over time to see how it might look in 5, 20 and 100 years. I used the "shadow caster" to optimize shadows over the course of a single day and at different times of the year. When my plan was done, I printed two- dimensional top views, three-dimensional side views and a list of materials along with estimated prices and units. Whew!

3D Landscape's How-To Guide is enormous. It explains everything from how to survey your property to how to build dry stone walls, work with contractors, write up and negotiate contracts, rent equipment, install French drains, transplant bushes and shrubs, select plants, and on and on. There is more than enough information for a do-it-yourselfer to get well into a project or to be able to talk with a contractor, and it is all step-by-step. 3D Landscape seems to address virtually every topic associated with landscaping, except for irrigation.

Design Your Own Home: Landscape Abracadata, P.O. Box 2440, Eugene, OR 97402; (800) 451-4871. DOS, Windows and Macintosh versions available. Requirements and cost: 286 processor, DOS 3.3, 640K RAM; mouse; 1MB hard disk space; $60. Windows 3.1, 4MB RAM and 6MB hard disk space; $60. Macintosh system 6.0.7 (or higher) with 2MB RAM and a hard drive; $100.

Design Your Own Home: Landscape is a basic object-oriented drawing program with predefined symbol sets for designing a landscape plan. You start with a blank drawing area onto which you draft your landscape from the top view. Select each symbol to build your house and other structures. Whereas 3D Landscape's symbols are three-dimensional structures, Design Your Own Home: Landscape provides a house and yard library of walls, windows and rooftops. I "assembled" my house first, then opened the large tree library to find the symbol that most closely matched the age, spread and height of my Torrey pine. The symbol was defined as a different pine, but I was able to rename it. I then placed other existing trees and shrubs on my lot. Unfortunately, Design Your Own Home: Landscape does not include any vines or herbaceous plants, so I could not indicate flower beds or lawn areas. According to the manual, I could create my own symbols and import them to the library, but it seems a shame that the program ignores two major categories of plants.

Designing a landscape with this program is extremely easy, though like the other products I reviewed, it requires an investment of time. The graphics are very simple -- almost simplistic. Some nice features include the option to view your design from the top, or from the side, by choosing North, South, East or West. Plant symbols can be resized as well as aged.

There is a set of sample landscape layouts included in the package. I found them to be useful only in terms of showing me how the program's graphics look. They were not useful as ideas for my own landscape; this was the only product I looked at that did not include landscape suggestions or ideas. The Windows version creates a materials list that can be exported to a companion product called Design Estimator. Design Estimator is advertised as an "estimating, bidding and quoting system." According to Abracadata, the upcoming Macintosh version will also create a materials list, but the current version does not.

LandDesigner Multi-Media for Gardens Green Thumb Software, 75 Manhattan Dr., Suite 100, Boulder, CO 80303; (303) 499-1388. DOS and Windows compatible. Requirements and cost: LandDesigner MFG requires a 386SX, Windows 3.1, 4MB RAM, VGA graphics, mouse, CD-ROM; $50. LandDesigner requires 286 processor, 2MB RAM, 2MB hard disk space; $40 DOS, $50 Windows.

LandDesigner Multi-Media for Gardens (MFG) is marketed as a "comprehensive CD-ROM-based garden and landscape design program." With this easy-to-use program, you draw your plan using standard drawing tools -- lines, rectangles, circles and squares. Because you have to draw all of the structures, it takes longer to draw a plan in LandDesigner than in 3D Landscape, but about as much time as with Design Your Own Home: Landscape. Two black-filled rectangles make up my house, with an unfilled rectangle as the front patio. I found it easiest to draw all the lines and shapes in their approximate sizes and locations -- sort of a rough draft. I then selected each element to access a window into which I entered the exact dimensions. Once this foundation layer was in place, I started a new layer to place existing plants.

I selected tree symbols, shrub symbols and herb/ground cover symbols from their respective LandDesigner libraries. These are generic symbols that allow you to place a 30-foot-wide tree next to a yellow crocuslike flower, or put a two-inch, pink-flowered plant into a sea of evergreen ground cover. Though the symbols are generic, each can be linked to one of the 850 plants in LandDesigner's database. Each plant (as well as hardscape elements and buildings) gets an individual code (such as "P18"), in addition to its botanical or common name. The information is displayed on a form that includes plant descriptors (tree, shrub, evergreen, flower color and season), culture conditions and a text box for notes. Again, most of the plants in my yard are not in the database, so I added them using a blank form for each. I drew future hardscape elements on the third layer of my plan, and future plants on the fourth.

If you get stuck for ideas, you can look at LandDesigner's narrated slide shows. The slides showcase garden beds at White Flower Farm in Litchfield, Connecticut (Green Thumb's collaborator on LandDesigner MFG). You can also import a set of "garden templates." Most of the templates include a color image of a single garden bed or border. I found the photographic quality not up to par. But when you import the template into your plan, you have both the layout and a list of plants to create that border. LandDesigner's plant library also includes color images -- unfortunately of the same quality as the templates.

When my plan was finally done, I printed it along with a handy list of plants and materials. If I had been so inclined, I could even have printed a completed order form for White Flower Farms.

With the on-screen image, color coding makes it easy to distinguish between pink-flowered plants and yellow-flowered plants, chain link and split rail. But I'd need a color printer to see those details on the printout. Green Thumb also markets LandDesigner ($50), a floppy disk package that is similar in design features and capacities. In addition, Green Thumb offers add-on plant encyclopedias for various zones at $20 each. With both LandDesigner products, you can print out a materials list and, if you've dutifully updated prices, a cost projection.

Targeted to professionals, LandDesigner Pro ($500) is the same basic program as LandDesigner, but more so: 300 landscape symbols are included, but you can also create and store your own, and you can view and print various elevations of your plan.

Look Into the Garden Look Systems, Inc., 105 Cascadilla Park Rd., Ithaca, NY 14850; (800) 698-5665. Requirements and cost: 386SX, 8MB RAM,Windows 3.1, 256 color display; $50.

Have you ever stood back and looked at your yard, trying to envision a tree over by the corner, a perennial border, under the window or a hedge next to the driveway? Professional graphics programmer and avid gardener, Anh Look, did. But unlike most of us, she knew the computer's capabilities. She had tried various design programs, but to her they didn't look realistic enough. Ultimately Look decided to write the kind of program she would like. Look Into the Garden gives you an opportunity to see exactly how it would appear -- by using snapshots of your own yard.

If you have a scanner, you can scan your own images. If not, Look Systems will scan your pictures for you and send them back to you on disk -- two free images per package. Open the images online, and paste in photos of plants from the Look database, along with ornaments and structures such as benches and picket fences. Enlarge your lawn or shrink your patio with draw tools, and fill the space with flagstone, brick, concrete, grass, gravel or soil.

Look Into the Garden does have limitations. For example, if you draw an extension to your patio and fill it with flagstone, you can't select it again and change it to brick. To change the fill, you must redraw the entire shape. With the next release of the software, users will be able to change the fill of a shape without redrawing. Presently, the plant database is quite limited.

You can also create a custom database of plants, ornaments and structures by simply scanning photographs or images from a book or magazine. Save them in the appropriate graphics formats, and use the software's "outline" function to cut and copy the images onto your background picture. You can manipulate the custom, imported pictures the same as you can database pictures.

By early next year, I'm told a CD-ROM version containing more than 1,000 images will be available. This upcoming release will also have flip and rotate functions, so you can change the perspective of objects. This will be helpful when looking at a bench, for example, at an angle other than straight on.

Though the software deviates a bit from standard Windows conventions, if you can cut and paste an image, you can use Look Into the Garden.

Recommendations

My favorite is 3D Landscape. It's for the novice as well as for the serious gardener and do-it-yourselfer, like me, who wants to do some of the work but also needs to work with contractors. If you want to develop a landscape plan for a large area, 3D Landscape is the best choice.

Look Into the Garden does not create landscape drawings, and it doesn't eliminate the need for a landscape design program. But for those of us who have trouble envisioning how our yards might look, Look Into the Garden is a valuable tool. If you are a homeowner, or a designer who has an idea to get across -- well, you know the saying, "A picture is worth a thousand words."

Nan Sterman is a gardener and multimedia designer living in Olivenhain, California. She used two different computers to review these software packages: a Macintosh Quadra 660AV with 8MB RAM and a 230MB hard drive, and an IBM PC with a 486SLC75, 8MB RAM, a 540MB hard drive and a double-speed CD-ROM. Part II of her article, a review of plant- encyclopedia software, will appear in an upcoming issue.

Copyright NGA

Reprinted with permission HouseNet, Inc.

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