CAD software for landscapers and garden designers

GardenCAD Pro is a CAD software tool for professional landscapers & garden designers. Imagine being able to quickly produce a number of drawings of your designs to show a client. Consider the possiblity of visiting with your client and together altering the concept 'on the fly'. Eliminate scratching out parts of paper drawings and the need to redraw.

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The figure below shows a typical GardenCAD plan.

With GardenCAD and access to our comprehensive training materials, you can create drawings such as this.

Click here to play a short movie demonstrating GardenCAD's capabilities: 

  For more detailed information about the software, and to see GardenCAD in action on a real job, click here.

Print a GardenCAD design on any size sheet (color or B&W)

Here is a design by TooKoo landscapes printed from the GardenCAD Pages palette onto an A1 sheet.

About GardenCAD

GardenCAD is a professional, vector-based, CAD software tool enabling the rapid development of CAD plans with much of the 'look and feel' of hand drawn designs. Unlike AutoCAD and IntelliCAD, (the CAD tools most commonly used by landscape architects and garden designers), most steps for creating a CAD plan can be accomplished simply by clicks of the left or right mouse button. There is little or no need to learn complex command line instructions to build drawings.

GardenCAD on Macs

** Note that GardenCAD does not work natively on Macintosh computers but can be made to work if you install the Crossover product on your Mac. Alternatively some Mac users boot into a Windows environment when they want to use GardenCAD.**

GardenCAD and broad scale work

The examples above showed GardenCAD in use on relatively small scale project. You can however use GardenCAD as a lightweight GIS tool. The figure below shows some data from an extensive survey of trees surrounding an artificial wetland. Here we have stored attribute data about the condition of trees growing in and around the wetland. Data on the condition of an individual tree can be accessed simply by clicking on the symbol - GarndenCAD displays attributes hidden behind the symbol.

Some GardenCAD users 

Here are some logos used in GardenCAD drawings by some of the landscapers in the GardenCAD community. GardenCAD allows the use of blocks. The logo is created once as a separate GardenCAD drawing and then inserted into subsequent drawings (as a block).

GardenCAD models are full size

GardenCAD allows the creation of accurate models which reflect what will be built when a design is implemented. You create a full size design for the site and because it is full size, accurate dimensions and quantities can be taken from the model. Our What's New page has descriptions of how dimensions can be taken from a GardenCAD design. Here is another typical small scale GardenCAD plan for a rear garden.

Planting symbols

GardenCAD comes complete with a wide range of pre-drawn symbols which can be plotted in black and white or full colour. Attractive designs are created simply by dragging these symbols into position from our Plant Selector and then moving, scaling and rotating them at will.

Drafting aids

Not only are there many planting symbols, but the software also contains numerous general purpose symbols and tools to help lay out site boundaries, locate buildings, take dimensions directly from the design (the model), set up design grids, apply hatching to entities (objects) such as paths, paved areas etc. etc. Our downloads page also provides some useful resources.

The figure below shows an angular dimension (35 degrees) applied (automatically) to the drawing by picking the two lines that make up the angle.

Lettering

Many users configure GardenCAD to use a custom font to give their drawings 'personality', thus moving their designs well away from typical CAD drawings (which can be rather stilted and mechanical).

Plant schedules

GardenCAD also allows the storage of much non-graphic information with its symbols. You can store botanical name, common name, plant name, size, code as hidden attributes. This information will be used in future versions of GardenCAD to generate plant schedules by extracting infromation to spreadsheets such as Excel.

Printing plans

Your plans can be printed to any size sheet of paper in full colour and can be printed to the printer attached to your computer or in PDF form for emailing to your clients. Alternatively, designs can be sent to copy centres for professional printing and laminating on larger sheets.

Learning to use GardenCAD

You may care to visit

http://www.gardencad.net/UsingGardenCAD/contents.htm

and take a small introduction from our training course on how to use GardenCAD. This is part of one module from our extensive course on the use of GardenCAD which can be found at http://www.landscapetutor.net

Please note that only one module is available here. Our 'proper' Introduction to GardenCAD course contains >20 modules which provide comprehensive training in the use of the software.

GardenCAD Pro

We have consulted with many professional designers during the development of GardenCAD. We have tried to make the software work in a visual and intuitive way, mimicking the classical approach to hand drawing.

Support

Please note that this web site provides the main avenue for GardenCAD support. The companion site http://www.diploma.gardencad.net also has many helpful articles and training exercises. If you have further queries or comments, please send an email to: info@gardencad.net.

Landscape Diploma

For more formal training in landscape design, please visit our online landscape diploma site http://www.diploma.gardencad.net