Better Homes and Gardens Landscaping and Deck Designer 8.0

Editorial Review
Plan and design your perfect outdoor living space! Landscaping & Deck Designer makes it easy to quickly design the virtual look and feel of your backyard, deck, patio, pool or any outdoor project. Just point-and-click to add pre-arranged landscaping beds and any of over 4,000 Library items to your design--or import your own.

Create beautiful landscapes, terrain features, gardens and decks for your perfect outdoor living spaces.

Quickly design the virtual look and feel of your backyard, deck, patio, pool or any outdoor project.

View Product Demo

Make your deck or patio ideas come to life with built-in 3D visualization tools.

Choose from several styles of templates--decks, landscaping, pools and terrains to start your next deck or landscaping project.

Fun & Easy Outdoor Home Design Software
Landscaping & Deck Designer makes it easy to design your next outdoor project. Use valuable resources like Plant Chooser to learn more about plants, the Design Planning Center with design tips, and choose from over 3,700 plants, trees and shrubs to place and arrange in your outdoor living space. Create the virtual look and feel before you build!

Over 3,700 Landscaping Plants

Get started quickly by choosing pre-arranged garden beds to place into your design
Choose from over 3,700 realistic plants; import photos of your own plants--view a sampling of plants
Plant Chooser to quickly locate and learn detailed plant information
Plant Hardiness Zone maps--North America, Europe and Australia
Advanced plant searching by sun, shade, watering, deer resistance and more
Plant Growth slider tool--visualize how your plants will look in 3, 5, or even 20 years from now

Get Started Quickly and Easily

The Quick Startup Options Guide will help you begin with "How-To" tutorials based on the type of your project
Select from the pre-designed Landscaping, Deck and Pool Templates
Exclusive Design Planning Center for up-to-date How-To and Design Tips from the experts to help in your design process
Includes Step-by-Step Tutorial DVD Packed with over 40 easy "step-by-step" tutorial training videos that will quickly get you started on your next outdoor design project

Decks and Patios

Make your deck or patio ideas come to life with built-in 3D visualization tools
Experiment with your design and take a virtual tour
Use the Deck Designer tools to quickly design the layout of your deck
Design single or multi-level decks including free-standing, tiered and post-and-beam
Deck foundations automatically generate to match sloped lots
Automatic and manual deck framing tools with an advanced deck framing option for more complicated deck designs
Use the automatic tools for adding stairs, deck railings and roofs
Define decking materials, place and arrange outdoor furniture to correctly size your deck or patio
Automatically generate a complete spreadsheet for your project costs, broken down by category. Calculate the amount of lumber for your deck or concrete required for your new patio.
Generate various styles of Automatic roofs for your deck or patio

Use the Pathway or Stepping Stone tools to design curb-appealing landscaping using stone or pavers--line with trees, shrubs, flowers and more.

Visualize designs with day and night views.

Quickly create flowerbeds by choosing from one of the several pre-arranged flower groupings or create your own flowerbed using specific plants.

Plants and Landscaping

Quickly create flowerbeds by choosing from one of the several pre-arranged flower groupings or create your own flowerbed using specific plants
Use the Replace from Library to choose a group of plants and replace with another
Import your digital photos and add landscaping features such as fences, trees, flowers, shrubs and more!
Drag and drop thousands of items from the Library Browser. Choose plants, pavers, windows, doors, outdoor accessories, textures, furniture and more. Download Free Bonus Libraries from our website.
Use the Better Homes and Gardens Design Planning Center to help guide your designs with guidelines, tips and expert advice
Design Inspiration Gallery--Our gallery of photos will help you to jump start your design and decorating style ideas with inspirational photos by rooms

Outdoor Design Tools

Choose from several styles of templates--decks, landscaping, pools and terrains to start your next deck or landscaping project.
Design in 2D and 3D. 3D Views are automatic--just point-and-click with the camera tool. You can even use Glass House view to see through surfaces.
Create a Virtual Tour--draw your record line to Automatically Generate; or record your camera movements
Visualize designs with day and night views
Generate shadows from the sun for realistic 3D views
Choose from a variety of styles of great looking outdoor furnishings including tables, chairs, swing sets, or import your own. Easily change the size and color.
Use the Pathway or Stepping Stone tools to design curb-appealing landscaping using stone or pavers--line with trees, shrubs, flowers and more
Material Painter lets you apply colors and materials quickly and easily
Choose from thousands of colors and textures or create your own materials using a digital photograph

Terrain Design Tools

Ponds & Streams--Create water features for your landscaping projects using the Stream or Pond tool--simply click to place and then resize
Terraces and Terrain Walls--Use the Terrain Wall Tool to create terraces or divide your Terrain slopes
Contours and Elevations--Drag elevation lines or set specific elevation points to create your contoured lots
Use Automatic Build Terrain and Terrain Perimeter tools to create flat, irregular shaped or sloped lots--use a GPS to import or enter elevation data

Site Planning Tools

Create plot and perimeter plans; automatically generate a 3D model of your actual terrain
Virtual Graph Paper displays a grid for 2D planning
Sprinkler Designer tools to easily layout sprinkler zones
Fences, Driveways and Sidewalks follow terrain contours
Hill and Valley tools make it easy to add gardens, beds and slopes that automatically appear in 3D views. Choose from landscaping style templates or create your own.
Define Terrain Elevation lines, Elevation Regions and Terrain Breaks
Automatic Terrain Perimeters--customize to define your specific lot
Plot and perimeter plans--flat and sloped lots
One-Click Hill and Valley tools
Create terraces with retaining walls that follow terrains and can break the terrain
Manual dimension tools measure any distance including dimensioning to individual plants

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Customer Reviews

Good Landscaping Product

2008-07-04
I looked at a few software programs and downloaded free trials and none came close to the power and ease of use of this program.

The program offers many options that you can spend hours looking through. The plant library has a good selection. You can search for plants pretty easy, name, zone, sun requirement and about 20 other attributes. A blank search with no specific requirements showed 3,784 plants.

I found that it was good to design the landscaping in 2D so I could see the flower beds, patio, paths, etc. and where they were located with respect to the house. The 3D tools are helpful in visualizing how it should then look in `real life'. I definitely made changes to my original idea after using the software. There are built-in templates you can use - they're okay if you don't already have an idea of what you want.

I do recommend watching the tutorial videos they were quite helpful. Bottom line, I think it's a good bargain and recommend it before you take on a project.

Not exactly as easy as it looks

2008-06-13
Some wonderful features. Unfortunately the tutorials don't seem to give correct information. Appears to have a bug in the plant library, sometimes the pictures of the plants will appear as shown in the tutorial other times the list gets shortened and you don't get any pictures of the plants at all. I'm still trying to figure out how to make a curved path and to get my plants to be shown in the draft version and in 3D.