Susan H. Simko wrote:
What I'm looking to do is a layout of the
yard with beds marked and then a detailed layout of each bed with
markers indicating what's planted where. Any thoughts, ideas?

I've had a number of house projects going on over the past few years and
have tried two major "consumer" programs (Broderbund Home Architecht and
Punch! Master Landscape suite).

The HA was pretty useless for anything precise, I found - I finally got
enough into it to lay out my kitchen remodel and visualize what I wanted,
but wanted nothing to do with moving further into its landscape
capabilities. This was version 3 I was using, and didn't like it.

The Punch! on the other hand did work out very nicely - I happened to have
a plat survey from when I bought the house, and the s/w had a feature to
scan that in and use it to get a scale base for the entire lot. Quite
handy, and in about an hour I had my lot line, the fence around the house
and a simple exterior sketch of the house (good enough since I wanted to
experiment with deck designs and tree locations).

Our only garden project at that time was a rose bed with some sedums for
low level interest and this was quickly sketched out and plants added - in
the 2d plan it looked quite neat, with little circles and lines for the
plants like what you see in gardening mags. However, I haven't looked to
see if it can actually label each of the plants yet - maybe you could use
those tools to do the layout, then import into photoshop to add the text
and labels where you want them.

Playing with the 3d-modelling was fun, but maybe not what you're looking
for from your description of what you wanted to do. You can "grow" the
plants over a couple years which seemed kinda hokey at first, but turned
out to be helpful to me in visualizing stuff.

Then I tried to add the land countours, heights, slopes, elevations. A
*major* struggle. A friend bought the "Master Landscape Platinum
Professional" version of the software and lent it to me for awhile - that
version had a nice contouring tool which worked better than the less
expensive version I had purchased - it had a slope tool which you could
define starting and stopping points as well as the angle (the cheaper one
let you define a "lot slope" as though the entire lot was completely evenly
sloped like a piece of cake on it's side. Not very realistic!) Then you
have "hole" and "berm" tools to raise and lower more specific shapes. I
found that using the custom slope tool with MANY intersecting and opposing
slopes I was actually able to "approximate" my lot pretty well - good
enough to plan the decks visually, but not accurate enough to actually
measure the number of steps needed to hit the ground - it's not meant to do
that easily.

If I get the chance and if there's any interest, I'll export the 2-d and
3-d models to .bmp and post them on a web page.

--
Brent Harsh - KD4PBO

Cary, NC