For our user research, we interviewed five gardeners with a combined experience of more than 45 years. Through these interviews, we learned about the difficulties of planning a garden. We also collected feedback on what products gardeners like, what products they dislike, and what products they felt were missing in the current market.

There are currently many online garden planning tools that attempt to facilitate planning through customization and visualization. However, all of them still require gardeners to visualize the actual size of the garden and how it would look at different spots since they could only view numerical dimensions of garden layouts and flowers. In addition, most of the planting plans or options provided are not personalized to their garden conditions such as landscape, sun, shad and climate needs. Gardeners either need to spend additional time giving out information about their garden, or become more knowledgeable and be selective in their choices.

BBC- Design your garden



BBC provides various garden planting plans with information about each flower and the amount of each plant gardeners would need to attain the visualization. However, a sense of distance is lost and views from different angles cannot be visualized by the user.

Better Homes and Gardens- Garden plan finder







Gardeners first answer multiple questions about the light, moisture, and other conditions of their landscape and planting plan is recommended. Plan gives an illustration of the garden at maturity, a planting plan, and a detailed plant list. However, this process is time-consuming if the gardener is using this guide repeatedly.

Plan-a-Garden



Illustrative planner in which a gardener can customize the look of the garden by dragging preferred layout, flowers, trees, structures and accents. Gardener can create multiple looks, print them, and send the design to others by email. The application only shows the garden from the top view, and not what the gardener would actually see from different side views. Also, the gardener still needs to visualize what it would look like in life-size and would need to research beforehand what types of plants would suit his soil.