Customer Reviews

Better Homes and Gardens Landscaping and Deck Designer 7.0 [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I picked this up in the hopes of visualizing some possible landscape options for our front and back yard without having to pay a professional landscaping firm for a consult.

First, the good. The tutorial videos are straightforward, easy to follow, and easy to learn from. The user interface is also pretty good, and I managed to make a reasonable approximation of our house in under 20 minutes. There's also a ton of trees, plants, shrubs, and so on, and the "zone finder" is very helpful in narrowing down what will grow in your particular area.

Now the bad. If your yard is at all hilly in an unusual way, that is, if it's not perfectly flat or gently sloped, you're going to have a nearly impossible time getting your yard laid out with this software unless you have a degree in cartography. I consider myself pretty bright, and pretty adept with maps, and I still cannot manage to lay out my yard correctly with this software. Given, I have an unusual yard. The driveway slopes down, but the front yard remains level until it hits a 5' retaining wall. The back yard has at least three distinct levels. Still, this software claims it can handle odd yards, but it does a poor job at it.

Second, if your tastes in landscaping run to the extreme, hire a professional. There's plenty of "garden variety" gardens in this software, but if you're looking for unusual water features, perhaps asian-inspired accents (very popular here in the Pacific NW), look elsewhere. While heavy on plants, decks, and lawn furniture, anything unique or slightly out of the ordinary isn't included here. My own design called for a basalt fountain. Not to be found, even for download on the website. And oddly shaped stone patios? Don't even try, unless you want to individually model every stone. You may as well just skip the software and get right to real landscaping.

For a vast majority of people going with very tried and true, non-experimental and non-extreme landscaping designs, this will probably be very adequate software. Want to arrange some flowers, trees, and bushes on your mostly flat yard? This is money well spent if you have no talent with pen and paper. However, if you're looking for a solution to unlock your hidden creatvitiy, look to a professional, or stick with your existing artistic skills in the medium of your choice.

I am enjoying this product. It was not hard to get the basics set up, except for the elevation levels for the terrain. However, with some experimenting and some reading, I was pretty much "designing" within a few days (I work, so this was play time). I am not terribly computer savy, but was able, through trial and error, to use the software in a relatively short period of time.

Main drawback is the limited number of plants in the menu. Most of the standard plants are available, but I am looking for a download that would bring in additional plants.

All in all, I feel that if I can do this, and enjoy it as much as I have, just about anyone can feel confident about buying it. I am pleased.

The software has good tutorials and is fairly easy to use. It was difficult trying to layout a non-square plot plan. I would have liked a larger tree / plant selection for my area (Colorado) as I live in a covenant controlled community that only allow certain types of landscaping. Overall a good piece of software.

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.

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.

I wanted a program to help me document my "new" yard. I became a Master Gardener to learn how to do the yard and bought the program to record it. The program was more work than the yard (and it is a significant yard) It is limited, convoluted and took up so much space in my computer that it made my other computer tasks more difficult. I removed the program.

Good modeling tool with great 3-D graphics which allows the user to view from any direction. The component selection is adequate and the tutorial was informative allowing me to get started designing within the first hour of installing the product.

The landscaping software has a steep learning curve, and it's somewhat difficult to navigate. It took me hours to try and build my back yard, and when all was said and done, it didn't seem worth it. This product seems well suited for people who will use this software for a business, not a personal yard project. It's too complex for the average homeowner who just wants a simple and quick application.

I have mixed feelings about this software. On one hand, it's a bunch of fun to play around with your landscaping and this software does a great job of allowing you to put virtually anything in your yard and then view it in either 2D or 3D. There's a ton of plants and yard "stuff" to use. The interface is fairly easy to understand and use. Where I lose some interest is, I found the feature to duplicate your house and yard fairly difficult. The concept of putting a picture in and the program using that didn't work well. That part of the software was pretty disappointing for me as you really want to see your actual house in the plans.

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.