LeCoqRoti
Garden Planner is a drag-and-drop landscape design tool that arranges plants, trees, buildings and hard landscaping on a flat canvas you can print or export as an image.
Library elements — customisable. Every symbol you pull from the library can take on your own line weight, fill colour and shading, so a shrub becomes your shrub.
Paths — refreshed. The 3.8.86 update introduces a set of new path styles alongside the familiar gravel, stepping stone and brick options.
Geometry — kept simple. Rotate, duplicate, scale or reshape any object on the board without leaving the main window. A property inspector slides out for precise adjustments when you need them.
Text — built in. Label beds, note varieties or add a planting date right on the plan. The text tool behaves like a simple word processor, enough to keep a drawing legible without cluttering it.
Output — two image formats. Finished projects export as JPEG or PNG, and a print preview screen shows exactly how the high-resolution sheet will look before you commit to paper.
A scene: the kitchen-garden redesign
Late on a Sunday evening, a gardener in a terraced house opens Garden Planner with a surveyor's sketch beside her keyboard. She has two hours to turn the rough measurements of an east-facing strip into a presentable planting plan for a client meeting on Tuesday. She drags the plot boundary first, scaling it from seven metres down to a screen-sized rectangle, then drops in a pre-sized vegetable bed from the library. A few clicks adjust the bed's fill to match the dark loam she knows is waiting beneath the turf. She pulls in four apple cordons, rotates them to run north-south for the best light, and labels each with its variety. The 3D walkthrough, run once before saving, confirms the sight lines from the kitchen window. She exports a PNG, attaches it to an email, and closes the lid.
Mistakes: what trips people up early
Beginners often treat the canvas like a painting rather than a plan. They place plants at visually pleasing intervals without checking the scale bar, then wonder why a three-metre birch looks the same size as a dwarf box. The fix is simple: set the scale first, before adding anything.
Another common slip is ignoring the z-order of objects. A path drawn after a shrub sits on top and hides half the foliage; a quick right-click to send it backward restores the intended look. Many new users also forget to group elements before scaling an entire border, stretching shrubs into impossible proportions. Grouping takes two keystrokes and saves real headaches.
A subtler mistake is relying on the default library symbols without adjusting them. A generic tree symbol left unmodified reads as placeholder work to a client or a planning officer. Taking thirty seconds to tweak the canopy colour and line weight makes the plan feel owned rather than borrowed.
Workflow: designing a courtyard from a blank page
For a small walled courtyard, start with the boundary walls. Drag four wall segments from the library, snap them to ninety degrees, and lock the scale to the actual dimensions. Next, establish the hard surfaces: a paved seating area in the sunniest corner, drawn with the path tool set to a sandstone texture, then a narrow gravel strip along the north wall for drainage. Drop in a circular pool from the objects library, centre it on the main axis, and soften its edge with three hostas pulled from the plant list.
Now for the planting. Filter the library to shade-tolerant perennials for the north side, sun-loving shrubs for the south, and place them loosely at first. Use the duplicate tool to repeat a grouping of lavender and erigeron along the path edge, then adjust spacing until the rhythm feels right. Add text labels for each specimen, print the object report as a CSV for the nursery order, and export a high-resolution JPEG of the final layout. The whole sequence, from empty canvas to printable plan, runs under forty minutes once the gestures become automatic.
A working session: an hour with a community garden plot
Nine in the morning. Open Garden Planner and load yesterday's file: an allotment plot measured out at ten by fifteen metres. The skeleton is there — boundary hedge, compost bins, a shed in the bottom corner — but the central beds are still empty rectangles. The task this morning is to lay out the rotation plan for the coming season.
Start with the brassica bed, the largest rectangle on the left. Drag in cabbages and kale from the vegetable section of the library, spacing them at forty-five centimetres using the duplicate-array trick: place one, copy, drag to the right distance, then repeat the last action. Add a row of tagetes along the edge as companion planting, smaller symbols with the fill set to a muted orange. Label the bed "Brassicas — net after planting" in a light sans-serif.
Move across to the root vegetable strip. Carrots, parsnips, a block of beetroot. The property inspector lets you fine-tune the row spacing without dragging, which is faster once the fingers know the shortcut. A path of woodchip — chosen from the new path styles — runs between the beds, wide enough for a wheelbarrow. Switch to the 3D view for a quick check: the shed is blocking the morning light on the salad bed, so slide it two metres east. The 2D plan updates automatically.
Before breaking for coffee, run the object report. It lists every plant by name and quantity: eighteen cabbages, forty carrot stations, six beetroot blocks. Save it as a TXT file for the allotment secretary and print a copy of the plan for the shed noticeboard. Close the file, shut the Mac, and step outside into the actual garden that now matches the drawing.
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