Do garden design easily with Sketchup

Are you good on a computer? If you find it easy to learn to use software tools, you’ll love Sketchup. And if you’re struggling to create a garden design to suit your wannabe alfresco lifestyle, you’ll love it even more.

Sketchup is widely used by professional garden designers as well as architects, interior designers, animators and video editors. But it’s also hugely popular with schools, colleges and universities, and not just for its brilliant functionality. It comes with a free version that you can play around with, plus a vast library of free tutorials and resources… and that makes it perfect for designing a garden on a DIY basis. It’s so much better than battling with a pen and paper.

So let’s take a look at what Sketchup can help you achieve around garden design. As an amateur garden designer who has never used CAD software before you’ll love the way it renders your designs in 2D and 3D. You’ll love the way it lets you create a practical, attractive and simple garden design. And the way your finished designs are accurate, with all the right measurements, displayed in glorious colour.

About Sketchup for DIY garden design

Sketchup garden design gives you a handy shape drawing tool including drag, pull, push, copy, paste and more, really easy to use and control. You should get a feel for how it works pretty quickly, and you’ll soon become familiar with the other applications in the toolbar. There are loads of great free tutorials on YouTube, which means you can learn how to use Sketchup in a matter of minutes, at no cost.

The garden design drawings you’ll create let you quickly, easily make changes to your plans. You can easily measure the size of the beds and lawns you include, which means it’s easy to buy the right amount of materials, saving you time and money.

It is billed as ‘perfect for Computer Aided Design beginners, homeowners, DIY fans, garden designers, horticulture students, garden landscapers and re-modellers’. There are hundreds of useful Sketchup ready-made components to download and add to your drawing. You can include everything from ready-made plants, grass, flower borders, shrubs and trees, climbing plants, patios, hedges, decking, fencing, sheds, plant pots and more. And the programme comes with a variety of landscape templates if you don’t really fancy starting from scratch.

That’s what we call an easy way to create the perfect backdrop for your alfresco lifestyle!