I’ve bought some books on garden design and am sketching out some plans. Are there any good apps or software that makes it a little easier to visualise and get the scale right?

I’ve never been much cop with crayons 🙁

This is going to sound like I’m taking the piss but im really not. Best, easiest and quickest way is to get some graph paper and some tracing paper. Draw the fixed elements like the house/garage/shed etc on the graph paper overlay the tracing paper and sketch out what you want to add. Once you get a bit you’re really happy with you can transfer it to the graph paper and start on the next element. Doesn’t need to be a beautiful sketch just needs to confirm that everything going in the right places and will fit how you imagine it will.

If you really want to use software then I guess sketchup will do what you want and normally has a few hours free trial, it also has a load of pre built models you can download so you might well find models of benches and bushes and trees and suchlike available for free too.

Far Cry 3 Map Editor 🙂

Jude and me (but mostly Jude), scanned in the land registry map we got when we bought the house, imported it to Inkscape and traced the lines. She also imported the aerial photo from bing maps (higher res than Google for our area) and copied the bigger bits in too (shed, oil tank, big trees etc.) We also noted north and things we like and don’t like. Views of the mountains, we will put the patio so we can see them when we sit out. Neighbours with big dog, we will plant some climbers and busier plants to disguise the big gappy fence between us.

We printed a few out to draw on. After we got some better ideas, we put them back into the Inkscape drawing too.

It’s worked well for us so far. We’ve come up with a better design than if we were just looking around in the garden. Now all we need to do is start digging.

Thanks for the tips. I’ve downloaded sketchup but think the tracing paper idea is probably where it’s at. Think I’ll join some graph paper together so I can increase the scale to make it easier.

Sketchup will work brilliantly but you have to go through the tutorials first otherwise its a huge struggle. Paper is always easier though

Please ensure you do the larger scale excavations with explosives and record it. This place has got awful dull recently.

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m11VH-dUPEk[/video]

Ta.

I used to design gardens for a living. Paper is the easiest way to start as you can change things much quicker, but I generally worked in sketchup to start with as I usually had the bones of an idea in my head after visiting the site and discussing the brief with the client. One thing to really focus on (poncy designer speak warning) is to design space, not features. Or in other words if it was a house you were designing don’t decide where the sofa is going and what colour the curtains are before you’ve decided how big the lounge is and where the doors and windows are.