Choose a template and customize it quickly and easily by dragging-and-dropping landscape elements like trees, fencing, hardscape, and more as needed. Type in the dimensions to resize any object precisely or drag it with your mouse. Add colors and textures easily.
You'll get thousands of ready-made symbols for walls, fences, plants, shrubs, paths, pools, spas, fountains, furniture, and more.
SmartDraw works hand in glove with your existing AI workflow whether you prefer ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or something else. Use your AI to jumpstart your design process by creating mood boards based on style, climate and functional requirements. Generate a list of plant recommendations based on local weather data, USDA zones, soil reports, and drought tolerance. Easily add any generated images to SmartDraw to enhance your project.
Take your garden plan created with SmartDraw's tools and ask AI to visualize how your design may look during different seasons or different lighting conditions.
SmartDraw works in both US/Imperial and Metric standards of measure. You can also create your own custom scale and change the scale at any time.
SmartDraw is easy to work with no matter what other apps you use. You can add garden designs to:
SmartDraw works hand in glove with most file storage systems. You can save your garden plans directly to:
There is no need to create a parallel set of common folders and permissions, SmartDraw can just save files directly into your existing set up.
Share your garden design with anyone, even if they don't own a copy of SmartDraw, with a link. You can also easily export any diagram as a PDF or common image formats like PNG or SVG.
Have a question? Chat or email us. SmartDraw support is in-house and free!
Share your garden design with your family. Make your DI-Y into a DI-T for team project. Your family and team can help you edit your plan in real time or leave comments and feedback on shared plans. With SmartDraw, it's easy to work together to make your vision come to life.
SmartDraw also works where you already communicate with your team. You can collaborate on designs in Microsoft Teams®, Slack or Confluence.
SmartDraw lets you design gardens, create irrigation plans, layout sprinkler systems, make site plans, plan fencing, and much more.
Start with SmartDraw's Garden Design template located under the Landscape Design category. This template will have all the tools and symbols you need to design your dream garden.
Create an outline of your space using property lines or fences as your guide. You can simply use the Line tool to sketch out your area. You can even include an outline of your house by drawing a building outline using the Wall tool.
Map out different zones using basic shapes like rectangles and circles to represent flower beds, vegetable garden plots, or any outdoor living spaces and patios.
Drag and drop symbols for trees, bushes, flowers, and trellises. Add any lawn furniture, pools, sheds, gazebos, buildings, and fountains that you plan to install. Once on the page, you can resize and rotate symbols to achieve the look you want.
You can use SmartDraw to design your sprinkler or irrigation system. Layout drip lines or place sprinkler heads strategically on your lawn.
Add colors and photo-realistic textures to show an area meant to be used for grass, mulch, stone, bricks, gravel or whatever surface your plan calls for.
Try different arrangements for your flower garden, vegetable rows, or pathways. SmartDraw’s drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to move elements around and explore options.
You can export your garden design as an image file like a PNG or SVG or save it as a PDF. You can also share your garden plan with anyone using a link.
Garden design software like SmartDraw lets you quickly visualize what your final backyard or garden project may look like. It's an easy way to sketch out your plans to hand off to a professional contractor and make sure your vision for your outdoor space is effectively communicated.
The 70/30 rule is about balancing native and non-native plants in your garden. The recommended ratio is 70% native to 30% non-native plants to support local wildlife.
AI tools and LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude are great for generating designs in the early stages of planning for inspiration. However, the images they produce are not editable and not to scale. We recommend using LLMs alongside a tool like SmartDraw's garden design software created specifically to design gardens, decks, and landscapes. This gives you the best of both worlds. You can translate a text prompt into an inspirational image and use SmartDraw to create a precise scaled drawing you can hand off to a contractor.
To help you move away from legacy software, SmartDraw can import and edit Visio® diagrams and stencils. See how good SmartDraw's Visio import is.
When designing your garden, you may find you need to create a custom shape for a pool, deck or some other specific landscape feature. SmartDraw makes creating custom shapes really easy. Learn more.
Using layers in SmartDraw allows you to group and separate items like your irrigation system and lighting so you can show and hide details or prevent editing of specific layers as needed. Learn more.
Looking for easy-to-use garden design software? SmartDraw has you covered.
Whether your plan is simple or complex, residential or commercial, large or small, SmartDraw's garden design templates help you achieve a professional result quickly and easily.
When it comes to garden layout software, there are many options. Inexpensive programs usually leave you with an amateurish result. CAD programs are hard to learn and very expensive.
SmartDraw gives you a better alternative. Not only does SmartDraw cost a fraction of expensive CAD programs, but you can be drawing your garden design just minutes from right now.
Discover why SmartDraw is the best garden designer today.