Garden planner

Choosing plants is where most home gardeners stall, because the failure is invisible until a season later.

A generated bed comes back labelled — Japanese maple, boxwood, lavender, agave, purple fountain grass — rather than as an anonymous mass of green. That single detail is the difference between a picture and a shopping list, and it is why plant naming is included here rather than sold as a separate purchase the way two of the larger apps in this category do.

Suggestions are filtered by the climate band derived from the location given during onboarding, which removes the most obvious category of error: a palette that cannot survive your winter.

It does not remove subtler ones. Mature spread, invasiveness and deer pressure are all local, and all worth checking before you commit.

Here is the arithmetic no render does for you.

Measure the bed. Look up mature spread for each species — not the pot label, the mature figure. Divide the planting area by the square of the spacing to get a count, then decide whether you are planting at final spacing or closer for early effect.

Perennials at 45cm centres run roughly five per square metre. Shrubs at 1.2m run under one. The difference between those two numbers is the difference between a $200 border and a $2,000 one, and it is invisible in an image where everything is already grown in.

Order 10% over for losses. Every planting plan loses some, and matching a species two seasons later is harder than buying spares now.

A render shows one moment, and it shows it with everything in flower simultaneously. No real garden does that on any day of any year.

Planning succession means deciding what carries each part of the season: bulbs in early spring, the first perennials through May and June, the long summer performers, then grasses and seed heads for autumn structure, then evergreen bones and bark for the four months when nothing is flowering.

Winter is the test. Look at a generated bed and ask what remains in February. If the honest answer is bare soil, add evergreen structure before you plant anything else.

The render gives you the summer picture, which is the easy one. Run a couple of palettes and then plan the other three seasons around what you chose.

Work in this order and the process stays cheap.

Pick a palette from two or three generated options rather than one, so you are choosing rather than accepting.

Write down every named species and check three things per plant: hardiness in your zone, mature spread, and whether it is invasive locally. Your regional extension service is the right authority for the third.

Measure, then calculate counts from mature spread rather than from the density in the picture.

Substitute freely. If a species is unavailable or expensive, ask a nursery for something with the same habit and season — that is a conversation you can only have because the render named things. The planting side of the app is covered here in more detail.