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From:Chief Architect
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![Better Homes and Gardens Landscaping and Deck Designer 7.0 [OLD VERSION]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61ZVQG5PLoL._SL160_.jpg)
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User Rating: Amazon Sales Rank:#990 |
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 Too few plants for the dry Southwest landscape, 2008-07-27
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.
 Better than nothing!, 2008-04-12
It was very helpful in planning my landscaping. Getting my home roof correct was tricky and my property has some slope in the front and I had a very hard time making it right. I planted 17 different varities of plants and I found about half of them in their plant directory.
3 of 4 customers found the following review helpful:
Good consumer product to get rough landscape ideas, 2008-02-17
The software was not what I expected. The 3D tools and views are incredible and can give the average person some ideas on how their landscape would look with some new shrubs, trees, deck, etc. However, I needed to use this software to draw 2D sketches for landscape companies. I freelance with small landscape businesses to draw 2D sketches of residential and commercial landscaping proposals. In the 2D view of this software, you are limited to just a handful of shapes to represent trees and shrubs. Such as a small shrub is a small circle and a larger tree is represented by just a larger circle. If I wanted to do that I could have bought a regular drawing program. You will not have any views of the thousands of trees and shrubs available in the program unless you view it in a 3D virtual tour type view. Really not the right fit for me since I need to provide a sheet of paper to my clients who then send it to their customers.
7 of 7 customers found the following review helpful:
Homes Yes, Gardens No, 2008-02-07
Possibly a great product for designing a home, but not so great for gardens. What a gardener needs is a plan that will print out easily with the plant labels marked on the plan so you can carry it out to the garden and know where to put which plants. This product creates blank circles for plants that are approximately the width your plants will be, but no labels unless you add a text label. If you then decide to re-arrange the garden plan, you have to move the plant and then move the label -- twice the work. Also, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER use their plant "aging" feature. If you correctly listed the width of your plants originally as they will be full-grown, the aging feature will change them permanently.
Also be aware that you cannot place plants in the "raised beds" available as a landscape feature. If you then use their 3-D imaging, the raised beds are really raised ... on top of whatever plants you placed in them on your plan. A raised bed sitting on top of 10 tomato plants looks interesting in 3 D to say the least.
It's an okay program, but difficult to use, and you have to buy the additional plant library if you want anything more than the basics. Good customer service.
6 of 6 customers found the following review helpful:
 Not bad for the money..., 2008-01-14
For the money, it's worth it. Though I must advise - it's easier to create your design from scratch or use their pre-installed plans as your starting point, than to upload your own images. You'll have to take time to learn how to use the features but that's true of any software. The plant library is not exhaustive and they could have added a wider range of garden furniture and ornaments.
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