Landscaping Made Easier

Rich Friedman

3D LANDSCAPE Books That Work, P.O. Box 50668, Palo Alto, CA 94303, (800) 242-4546, $49.95

It's that time of year again. The seed catalogs have arrived, the snow and frost are slowly receding, and that means it's time to follow through on those plans to landscape your property. 3D Landscape , the newest member of the Books That Work series, is an easy-to-use guide for playing what-if games for redesigning your yard.

Because gardening and landscaping always make the top 10 list of ways in which Americans spend their leisure time, a host of software programs have tried to help do-it-yourself designers make informed landscaping decisions. Unfortunately, most of those earlier programs contained little more than a simple database of plant names, linked to shade, sun, soi l, and temperature requirements. Not very inspirational or informative.

Because 3D Landscape is liberated from the nongraphical constraints of the earlier DOS programs, it presents information in a much richer manner. To get your creative juices flowing, the program contains beautiful template gardens for small city lots, huge formal English estates, and "informal" country spaces. By dragging and dropping icons of shrubs, trees, or other objects (from a database of 400 species) onto a preexisting template or new workspace, you quickly get a feel for what works and what doesn't.

Once you've designed your landscape, including placement, for example, of fences, paths, a pool, a patio, or even a barbecue, you have the option of viewing your work from a variety of dimensions. You can even see what plants and foliage will look like as they grow over the years. You also see how they change during the seasons.

Reality enters the picture when it comes time to see what your design costs an d how to implement it. The program calculates the cost of each item in your landscape. A how-to section with text, animation, photographs, and sound teaches you how to construct projects. 3D Landscape eliminates almost all your excuses for not tackling that landscape project.