The Occasional Gardener: A CD Rom is the latest garden tool - it helps you to visualise the perfect garden, writes Sarah Marriott
Garden design is a mystery to me. I must have spent days reading what experts have to say on the subject, but I still haven't managed to design even one section of my garden. One reason is that there are just too many plants to choose from and another is that I find it hard to visualise what plants will look like together when they're fully grown and at different times of the year.
That's why my mother - a keen gardener with a similar lack of visualisation skills - gave me a software programme promising "everything you need for great garden-making". According to Geoff Hamilton, the great British gardener behind "3D Garden Designer", it's a "great tool for the everyday gardener".
It's easy to install but using it takes a bit of practice - the manual doesn't really explain how to get started - and I still have problems "picking up" little boxes to move plants around. It comprises two main parts: the design planner and the plant encyclopaedia, but other useful bits are the garden care calendar, so you can see at a glance what needs to be done each month, and the plants disease section (with, unfortunately, non-organic remedies).
The part of my garden I want to plan is a rectangle of couch grass and assorted weeds which was used as a dumping ground during the house renovation and still has a pile of builder's sand in one corner.
A gravel driveway runs along one of the long sides, while on the other is a basic post-and-wire fence; it's bordered at the top by old oak trees and flowering cherries, and at the bottom by a fenced-off vegetable patch. Because it gets the sun until early afternoon in the summer I fancy putting in a bench surrounded by fragrant flowers; and I also want trees and shrubs for autumn colour; flowers for spring and summer and some grass for children to play on.
Using the encyclopaedia, I first searched for fragrant plants which will feel happy in peat soil and provide a low barrier to screen off the vegetable plot. It came up with 88 possibilities - from Albany Bottlebrush to yellow flag - and a click on each one gives loads of information (including the fact that yellow flag is too small to provide a screen).
I now know that curry leaf plant (Latin name: Murraya koenigii) is fragrant, edible, has leaves all year round, flowers from June to August, lives 25 years and grows to almost one metre high and half a metre wide - and a photo shows delicate pinkish petals and red berries.
If I put this into my garden plan, I can see it in two ways: an aerial view as a round blob or a 3D view, from various angles depending on where I place my "cameras".
One of the search filters is "edible" - which made me wonder if there was a plant which could create an edible, fragrant barrier. The encyclopaedia found lots of plants you can eat and lots of fragrant barriers, but few that can do it all. Among the edible barriers, I like the look of Currant 'Redstart', Fig 'Noir de Provence' and Hedgehog Rose 'Alba' while, for fragrance, I could add containers of herbs and a lavender hedge.
One advantage of a CD-Rom over just drawing a plan of a new design is that you can see what the plants will be like during each season and at their mature size. I now know that the rowan trees I put in a few months ago will one day be too tall for this part of the garden, and seeing the 3D view in winter emphasises the bareness and makes me determined to put in more shrubs for winter shape and colour.
As a tool to help me experiment with the garden before shelling out hard cash, "3D Garden Designer" is certainly useful but I don't think there's any substitute for visiting real life gardens for inspiration.
"Geoff Hamilton's 3D Garden Design" CD-Rom is published by Global Software Publishing
