These five free garden design tools can help you design a new garden or redesign your current one.

Five Free Garden Design Tools

If you need help planning your garden, these five free garden design templates can help. Some offer free landscape design software so that you can plug in the parameters and generate your own garden design, while others have designs to print and adapt for your own garden. There are free vegetable garden plans, flower garden plans, and rain garden plans (rain gardens are designs to minimize watering by using natural water sources such as rain). Check out these five free garden design templates and have fun this fall and winter dreaming of your new garden, and setting those dreams down on paper!

The Kitchen Garden Planner on Gardeners.com: I fell in love with this particular planner since I love kitchen gardens. Kitchen gardens, also called potager gardens, combine edible plants with ornamental plants. Herbs, fruits, vegetables and flowers are grown together in colorful profusion, usually near the kitchen door for easy harvest and use. This site provides pre-planned kitchen gardens as well as a tool to design your own. Kitchen Garden Planner.
Microsoft Office’s Garden Planner Template: If you have Excel on your computer, this Microsoft Garden Planner is a simple tool to track your plants and design a garden. Create a task list, plan your garden and more. Microsoft Office Garden Planner Template.
Better Homes and Gardens Plan a Garden: BHG’s free online garden planner offers drag and drop ease of use with clever tools to help you plan your landscape and garden design.
SmartDraw Professional Landscape Planner: Although intended to be licensed to professional landscape designers, SmartDraw offers a free trial version to download. If you’re confident in your design abilities, this tool provides you with the flexibility and power to create and design your own landscapes on your computer.
Rain Garden Planner: Rain Gardens conserve water and provide a beautiful, natural-looking landscape. Learn more about rain gardens and plan your own backyard rain garden with this free tool from Low Impact Gardening.

Cultivate Garden Ideas on Pinterest

Did you keep a scrapbook as a child? I loved clipping pictures from catalogs and magazines and saving them in a folder or box. I kept clips of outfits I loved, jewelry, household items and yes, gardens. Some of these ideas inspired me when I created my own garden for the first time; for example, planting a lavender border around the pink roses in my rose garden was directly inspired by a magazine picture, and the idea of planting daffodils throughout the fruit tree orchard came from a picture I saw in a book.

Now, of course, you don’t need to clip or photocopy pictures to save them. Pinterest is a social media site that allows users to “pin” or save images to imaginary corkboards online. If you’d like to start your own collection, visit Home Garden Joy and Gardening, two garden-themed boards I maintain on Pinterest. Just be wary about what you save on Pinterest; not all website owners appreciate having their images saved to the site.