Patio Garden

This program gave me what I needed in the end but the frustration with it is never-ending. Some of this frustration is certainly due to my lack of understanding about how the product works best. In other words, I’ve watched few of the tutorials and read nothing. However, I do try to problem-solve with the products training and help options when necessary. Here are a few examples of my frustrations. 1) the plant list is not adequate and often inappropriate (you can’t plant a common garden plant like lettuce but you can find a cranberry plant!), 2) You have little flexibility in designing the shape of objects like a patio or walkway, 3) If you have a 10′ x 10′ deck and try to cut and paste a 10′ x 10′ gazebo onto it you will have to downsize the gazebo first because the program does not allow for the gazebo to overlap the deck so you’re paste would have to be perfectly centered for it to work, 4) I could not size a pergola so that the roof crossbeams would extend out over my deck, 5) sometimes items overlap and the item on the bottom cannot be moved unless you uncover it, sounds simple but it can be a big headache.

So that all said I gave the product 3 stars because it got me what I needed, a landscaping plan that my wife and I can agree on. I’ve spent countless hours working with it and knowing the limitations up front can save time along the way.
Rating: 3 / 5

Simi-permanent water shortages are forcing a rapid change in residential landscape throughout the Southwestern United States. This kind of software is exactly what many of us non-professional could benefit from if it listed a wide variety of beautiful drought-tolerant plants to select from. Unfortunately, neither this nor any other software that I have seen incorporates a large and varied Southwest-friendly plant list. Excluding trees and succulents, I could only find 15 plants in this software that are Southwest-friendly. Too bad, there are thousands of beautiful plants that do wonderfully in this environment; for example, there are about 200 species from the sage family alone that are beautiful yet require very little water. Perhaps what’s needed is a special ’southwest’ version of the software.

One other thing, it is hard to create landscape elements that are not on the same physical plain as others; what I mean is, it’s hard to create a landscape in this software that is other then flat. Creating a large raise plant, for example, was hard for us to do.
Rating: 3 / 5