So you’ve planted your garden full of glorious flora and fauna – now what do you do? Enter SmartPlant, a garden design app that can help identify plants but more importantly, you can use it to create a care calendar for what’s in your garden, offering personalized advice on how to help each thing thrive. Users can also chat with experts for more tips.
Channel your inner landscape gardener by using AR or by uploading an image of your outdoor space and then visualize the end result by adding all the design elements from flowerbeds to paving and plants. A brilliant app for anyone who wants to DIY Renovate a garden, or collaborate with a team because all plans are shareable.
Better suited to those with a bit more experience, Home Outside is an app that lets you mock up designs like a pro, using hand-drawn elements instead of augmented reality. It is a brilliant tool and extremely useful when planning the color you want to spread in your garden.
Another great app for design planning, Home Design 3D’s key is in the name – it lets you plot the dimensions of your space and add everything from there, Shed plants and Furniture. Note that the free version doesn’t let you save designs, so it’s worth an in-app purchase if you plan to create your final designs in it.
We can suggest: Meet the best garden designers in the UK now
Garden Tags is an app to use once your garden is planted. As well as plant identification, it has growing advice and plant care instructions so you can log each plant and make sure you’re taking care of it properly. Think of it as a sort of planner and tracker for everything living in your garden – it’s as useful as it sounds.
If you’re planning a garden from scratch, Smartdraw is the app to use. It has an intuitive, easy-to-use tool for drawing and mapping your designs. Choose from a blank garden or pre-designed and go as you go, adding plants, paths and features to bring your garden to life. What’s more, live chat is really helpful for anything that stops you in your planning journey.
Another handy garden planner app is Gardena, which lets you choose the type and surface of your plot (clay, gravel, grass, and more) before adding shrubs and plants to create it. You will need to measure your garden plot first as it works best to scale.
This sun-tracking app makes it easy to determine where to position your plants. By tracing the movement of the sun, and how it will shade your garden, you can make sure you plant your sun-loving plants in all the right places and your shade-loving plants in more sheltered areas.
