3D Garden Builder

It is hard to judge a garden plan on paper. Will the tree crowd the shed? Is the path wide enough? Will the roses and the tomatoes both get the sun they need? This 3D garden builder lets you find out before you dig. Start inside a finished, landscaped garden and walk around it, then switch to design mode and rebuild it your way: drag in flowers, trees, vegetables, herbs and decorations, see growing advice for every plant, and finally walk through exactly what you built.

The builder is free, needs no sign-up, and keeps your designs in your browser. Everything you see is a real 3D model that you can move, turn, resize and recolor, so what you build in design mode is exactly what you walk through afterwards.

Two ways to use it: explore and design

Explore garden opens a landscaped garden in first-person view. Drag to look around and use the W, A, S and D keys or the arrow keys to walk, with Shift to run. On a phone, a thumb pad on the left does the walking. Tap any plant or object to see its name and growing guide. If you would rather be shown around, press Guided tour and the camera walks you past the fountain, the trees, the flower beds and more, with a short note at each stop.

Design my garden turns the same garden into an editor. Choose something from the library, click the garden to place it, and click anything already there to move, rotate, resize, recolor or remove it. Whenever you like, press Walk through my garden to see your design from eye level. Nothing is lost when you switch back and forth, because there is only one garden and both modes show it.

Three cameras

• Walkthrough: a first-person view at about eye height. You cannot walk through trunks, sheds, benches or ponds, and you stay inside the garden boundary.
• Bird’s-eye: a high view that shows the whole layout at once, handy for checking paths and spacing.
• Design view: an angled view you can rotate and zoom. Drag empty ground to turn it, pinch on a touch screen or hold Ctrl and scroll to zoom.

Moving between cameras is animated, so you always know where you are.

The plant and decoration library

The library holds 47 items in six groups, each shown as a small 3D preview:

• Flowers: roses, tulips, sunflowers, daisies, lavender, marigolds, lilies, orchids and hydrangeas.
• Trees: oak, maple, cherry blossom, palm, olive, a fruit tree and an ornamental tree.
• Plants and shrubs: ferns, hedges, flowering bushes, succulents, climbing vines, ornamental grasses and tropical plants.
• Vegetables and herbs: tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, basil, mint, rosemary, thyme, strawberries and kale.
• Garden decorations: planter boxes, flowerpots, benches, a pergola, a gazebo, a shed, a fountain, a pond, garden stones, fencing, lantern posts and an outdoor furniture set.
• Layout: planting beds, garden paths and patios, which you can stretch to any size within sensible limits.

Many items come in several colors. Roses, tulips, tomatoes, maples and other plants can be switched between realistic varieties, and paths and patios come in different finishes such as gravel, stone pavers, brick and timber decking.

Growing advice for every plant

Selecting a plant shows a guide with the things you need to know before you plant it:

• Sunlight: full sun (6 or more hours), part shade (3 to 6 hours) or shade.
• Watering: how much and how often.
• Soil: what it prefers, such as rich and moist, sandy and fast-draining, or slightly acidic.
• Mature size: how tall and wide it will grow.
• Spacing: how far apart to plant it.
• Climate and season: the zones it suits and when it blooms or crops.

Trees and shrubs are drawn at a young landscape size so they fit the garden, while the guide shows the size they will reach in time. Plan for that mature size when you choose where to put them. Your own growing zone is worth checking first, and the growing zone finder does that in a moment.

Placement that makes sense

You can be creative, but the builder will not let you build the impossible. As you move an object over the garden, a footprint shows green where it can go and red where it cannot, and a short message explains why. Some of what it checks:

• Trees cannot sit on top of a shed, bench, pond or another tree, and they keep a little clearance.
• Plants cannot go on a path, a patio or in water. They can go on the lawn or in a planting bed, where they sit on the raised soil.
• Furniture, benches and pots can stand on paths and patios, and furniture can go under a pergola or gazebo.
• Beds, sheds and ponds need open ground. A fountain can stand on a patio.
• Everything must stay inside the garden boundary, and objects always rest on the ground rather than floating above it.

If you drop something somewhere it cannot go, it simply snaps back and tells you what is in the way.

Editing tools

Click an object to select it, then use the toolbar or the Selected panel:

• Move, Rotate and Resize change what dragging does. You can also type exact values, turn an object through a full 360 degrees, or stretch beds, paths, patios, hedges and fences to the length you need.
• Duplicate makes a copy next to the original, and Make a row of 5 repeats a plant at its recommended spacing, which is the quickest way to plant a bed or a hedge.
• Replace swaps one plant for another in the same spot, as long as the new one fits.
• Colour changes flowers, trees and decorations between realistic varieties.
• Undo and Redo step back through up to 100 changes, and Reset design brings back the original garden.

Handy keys on a computer: R turns the selected item, D duplicates it, plus and minus resize it, the arrow keys nudge it, Delete removes it, and Ctrl and Z undoes your last change. On a phone, a bottom toolbar and a slide-up library keep everything within thumb reach.

Shape the whole garden

Under My gardens you can set the garden size, from 30 by 24 feet up to 120 by 90 feet, choose a lawn shape, and pick the covering for the lawn and for the border around it, from grass, wildflower meadow and clover to gravel and bark mulch. Add planting beds and paths to divide the space, place seating under a pergola, add a pond or fountain, and fence the edges. Keep your main paths about three feet wide so two people or a wheelbarrow can pass, and leave a clear route to every bed.

Garden check: advice based on real gardening rules

As you place plants, the builder watches for the mistakes that cause the most trouble in real gardens and explains them in plain language. The message appears as you hover, in the selected plant’s panel, and in a Garden check tab that lists everything in one place, with a Show me button for each item.

• Crowded plants: plants closer together than their recommended spacing compete for light, water and nutrients and catch more disease.
• Trees too close: trees whose canopies will overlap, and trees whose branches will overhang a shed or other structure.
• Plants over paths: plants whose mature spread will reach across a path.
• Sun and shade: an estimate of the hours of direct sun each plant gets at midsummer, allowing for shade from trees, sheds, hedges and fences. Full-sun plants such as tomatoes and roses are flagged if they get far less than six hours, shade lovers such as ferns are flagged in strong sun, and part-shade plants such as lettuce get a gentle tip.
• Blocked access: features such as benches, beds, the pond or the shed that nobody could walk up to because other objects wall them in. Keep gaps of at least two feet, and three is better.

Warnings never stop you from building. Some gardeners crowd plants on purpose, so the builder explains the risk and lets you decide. Set your latitude under My gardens, with a nearby city as a good start, so the sun estimate fits where you live.

Lawn shapes and ground coverings

Few gardens are plain rectangles. Choose a full rectangle, a rounded rectangle, an oval, an L-shape or a curved lawn, and the area around it becomes a border that you can cover in bark mulch, gravel, wildflower meadow or clover. Planting beds, paths and hedges can sit anywhere in the garden, including across the border, and the walkthrough follows the same layout. The layout image you download shows the same lawn and border from above.

Light, shadow and atmosphere

The garden is lit by a sun with soft shadows, and plants sway gently in the breeze. The lawn is covered in thousands of individual blades of grass that ripple in the wind, drawn efficiently in one batch so they cost very little. Grass never grows through beds, paths, patios or buildings, and it follows the lawn shape you choose.

Press Night view to switch to a starry night sky and moonlight, where the lantern posts glow and light the area around them. Turn on Sound for generated wind and birdsong by day and crickets at night. A soft splash from fountains and ponds grows louder as you walk towards them. The sounds are made in your browser, so nothing extra is downloaded.

The builder adapts to your device. If it runs slowly, it lowers the picture quality automatically by thinning the grass, lowering the resolution and finally switching off shadows, and it raises the quality again when your device has headroom, so editing stays smooth even with a lot of plants.

Save your gardens and take them with you

• A fresh start on every refresh: reloading the page brings back the original garden, so nothing carries over by accident. Your browser warns you first if you have unsaved changes, and Save my garden keeps a design.
• Save my garden: store named versions, such as “vegetable focus” and “flower border”, and load any of them later.
• Screenshot: download a high-resolution picture of the 3D view.
• Garden layout image: download a flat plan with the garden drawn from above and a list of everything in it.
• Share link: create a link that anyone can open to walk through your garden. They get their own copy to change, and yours stays exactly as it was.

Designs are stored only in this browser on this device. Clearing your browser data removes them, so download a layout image of anything you want to keep.

Plan a garden that works: five principles

1. Start with sun. Most vegetables and many flowers need six or more hours of direct sun. Place them first, then fit shade-tolerant plants such as ferns, hydrangeas and lettuce into what is left. The 3D landscape designer shows exactly where the sun falls through the seasons, and the sunlight requirement finder lists what each crop needs.
2. Respect mature size. Space plants for how big they will grow, not how big they are when you buy them. Crowded plants compete for light and water and are more prone to disease. The plant spacing calculator gives vegetable spacing.
3. Layer your planting. Put tall plants such as sunflowers, climbers and trees at the back or in the center, medium shrubs and flowers in the middle, and low plants and herbs at the front and along paths. Layers look full and make the best use of space.
4. Plan the paths first. Paths decide how you will move, water and harvest. Put them where people already walk, make them wide enough for a wheelbarrow, and use them to divide beds into sizes you can reach across, about four feet wide.
5. Plan for the seasons. Mix spring bulbs, summer perennials and fall color, and add evergreens, grasses and structures such as a pergola or fence so the garden looks good in winter. Timing for vegetables depends on your frost dates, which you can look up with the frost dates by ZIP code tool.

Planning a vegetable and herb garden

Edible plants are happiest in a sunny, sheltered, well-drained spot close to a water source and to the kitchen. In the builder, place planting beds first and then fill them: tomatoes and peppers at the sunniest end, lettuce and kale where there is a little shade, and herbs such as basil, rosemary and thyme close to the path so they are easy to pick. Keep mint in its own pot or contained bed because it spreads. Once you are happy with the layout, the raised bed planner and the vegetable garden planner turn it into a square-by-square crop plan with planting dates, and the raised bed soil calculator works out how much soil to buy.

From design to shopping list

When the design feels right, work out what to buy. Use the garden layout generator to check bed sizes, the mulch calculator for bark and gravel, the garden shopping list generator to gather quantities, and the garden cost calculator to set a budget. If you will water by drip, the drip irrigation calculator sizes the system.

What the builder does not do

• The models are stylized, not photographs, and each type of plant has a few shape variations rather than countless individual forms.
• Trees and shrubs are drawn at a young landscape size. Check the mature size in the guide and leave room for it.
• Growing advice is general. Local weather, microclimates and soil matter, so check your hardiness zone, test your soil, and ask your local cooperative extension office when in doubt.
• The sun check is an estimate for midsummer on a clear day. It treats trees as solid and ignores clouds and reflected light. For a month-by-month sun map of a specific yard, use the 3D landscape designer.
• It is a design aid, not a construction plan. Before building a structure or digging, check property lines, buried utilities and local rules.
• Saved designs stay in your browser, and there are no accounts. A share link shows the garden as it was when you created it, and anyone who has the link can open it.

Frequently asked questions