From the idea to implementation – save time and avoid mistakes – the new trend in garden planning

Fresh air, sun and peace: For many people, their own garden is a place where they can escape from the stresses of everyday life. But there is always something to do to beautify this oasis – if you want to transform the allotment garden, you should make a detailed plan to avoid unnecessary or duplicate work.

What used to require detailed drawings with pen and paper can now be realized directly on the PC using modern tools. Gardena’s free garden planner (via CHIP) even works directly in the browser. We show you how you can plan your garden in no time with the right programs.

Measure garden accurately

Of course, you can also start myGarden from Gardena directly and design the respective areas, thumbs up. However, this requires a lot of subsequent corrections and may cost you more time than if you take the moment to at least roughly measure your garden and record the dimensions in a drawing. You may even have a detailed floor plan of the plot, which is very likely if you own a plot of land with a house.

Having the correct measurements will help you work to scale better in most garden planning tools. This is also important for larger purchases such as tool sheds, trampolines or sandpits – is there even enough space on the lawn for that?

In the past there were numerous free garden planners for the PC, but most of them have not been consistently developed and therefore only partially meet modern requirements. The Gardena garden planner is more convincing, although there is still room for improvement.

If you have a rather rectangular property, you can also use the design templates. In most cases, however, it is better to design everything individually. Place your dimensional drawing or floor plan in front of you, ideally facing north, and switch on the grid in the Gardena garden planner for better orientation.

On the left under “Plot” you can select different soil types such as lawn, earth or pavement and create as many corner points as you like with a mouse click. The app shows the length of the respective edges directly. Finally, click the green checkmark and lock the layer so it doesn’t move randomly. Proceed in exactly the same way with bed areas, paths and terraces.

place objects

Once you have determined the large areas, you can place numerous objects from the following categories:

• houses and additions
• Plant
• furniture and leisure
• ponds and pools

Further menus open there with practical objects and the most common plants. You can place, scale, rotate and easily duplicate these using drag-and-drop. Sometimes the order of the levels is not quite right, so that a sandbox is displayed above the shrub – the Gardena garden planner could be optimized a bit here.

You can save the fully planned garden in the browser or save it as a PDF with the print dialog. It also contains a link that you can use to edit the planned garden later. This can also be reached via the share button. As a registered user, you can save different designs under “My Gardens”.

Alternative to installation

A very similar alternative is the Garden Planner (via CHIP), which requires installation and is not available for free. However, you can already get started with the 15-day trial version and plan your garden down to the smallest detail.

This tool also gives you a large selection of plants and objects for designing the garden. Although these are all in English, the graphics make it easy to identify the type of element. Here, too, the blocks can be rotated and scaled as desired.

The original of this article “Save time and avoid mistakes – the new trend in garden planning” comes from chip.de.