

To make nice curves I make a temporary circle and follow the pattern.Under view zoom in fairly large, this makes editing easier.For fancier editing, right click your mouse on one of these points and you will see a lot more options - you can delete a point, open up a curve you closed, make a segment between points straight or curved. Also you can pick up any spot on the line and make a new point. You can literally pick these up and move them around. You will now see a series of small black squares marking every spot where you clicked on your graph paper. Now that you have your rough bed shape drawn, right click on the shape (sometimes you have to be right on the line) and select EDIT POINTS. If you need to close in your shape (eg a stand alone bed) curve back to the starting point and DOUBLE CLICK and it will automatically close your shape. Don’t worry if it’s rough - you can adjust the shape later. Everywhere you click you get a point anchored to your plan. Now just draw your shape in by clicking on your grid paper, keep clicking along the way. To make curved beds I use the curve line option under autoshapes. You can select lines, arrows, squares, circles and a huge variety of shapes under AUTOSHAPES. I use the features in the drawing toolbar to do this.

Next I draw in the hardscapes (house, patio, etc) and basic bed shapes. You now have a spreadsheet that looks like graph paper with measurements down the top and left side. Put your measurement scale along the top and along the left. For my purposes I count one square as 2 feet but it could be anything you want depending on how big the garden is you are drawing. Each square now represents your scale.

Make as many columns and rows this scale as you think you will need. Looking at my saved sheets they say the column width is 2 and the row height is 14.5. I do this by changing the column width and row heights so they look like grid paper.
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You can even track information about your plants in the sheet if you like to.īelow are some simple instructions on how to draw a garden design plan without using special garden design software. The end result can give you a plan of your garden as well as a useful plant list. I eventually found that it was easier to use an Excel spreadsheet by treating it like graph paper and combining this with the many autoshape tools in Excel. Many of them were very cumbersome or too limited for what I wanted.
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I experimented with quite a few different garden design software packages.
