It used to be that when you set out to design your own garden, you would gather tools like colored pencils and graph paper to craft a sketch.

Today, you can design a garden on-screen using your favorite device and a garden design planner program.

You can virtually skip hiring a garden designer and develop your own landscape design.

Readily available tutorial videos bring everything from digging French drains to laying paver block into an average homeowners purview.

If youre not the kind of person who easily visualizes what a space can become, you may find efforts to design your own garden frustrating.

You might manage to create a nice patio area or vegetable garden, but relating those separate spaces into a cohesive whole may escape you.

The right plant-right place concept is simple enough to grasp, but putting the concept into practice requires a knowledge level or research effort that proves daunting to many homeowners.

Unless you speak plants, this can be the toughest part of designing the landscape of your dreams.

Look for a garden design planner that allows you to scan a photo of your home to create a true-to-life experience that doesnt require imagination to fill in any blanks.

Choose a program that offers a walk-through feature so you can wander through a virtual rendition of your finished landscape.

This feature allows you to filter the plant palette for your garden.

With some programs you can scan and submit photos of existing plants, such as trees and hedges, to see how theyll look in your landscape renovation.

In some virtual plant encyclopedias, the entries display how a plant changes over time, so you can see how your landscape shifts as plants mature.

It also lets you experiment with different patio, fence or deck options, patterns and materials.

Look for a program that includes an irrigation system feature, so you can tinker with designing and placing automatic irrigation in your new landscape.

A garden designer can warn you about plants that have particular weaknesses or maintenance issues, including ones that may have just developed, like a new disease or insect problem.

Hiring a garden designer also means youll tap into their network of suppliers and contractors, which can ultimately bring your garden together cheaper and more efficiently than when you figure things out on your own.

These low-maintenance spaces foster peace, tranquility, and relaxation.

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