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5 fantastic backyard design apps to help you craft your own personal oasis

5 backyard design apps to help you build and implement your landscape

Will Blesch
By

Do you ever feel the urge to shake things up in your backyard? Turn it into the oasis of the neighborhood and make it a gathering place for friends and family? To really envision something extraordinary, though — especially if you’re having a hard time coming up with fantastic ideas — you might want to allow technology to help you out.

Did you know there are amazing backyard design apps that can provide incredible landscape design tips? Well, there are, and we’re going to discuss five of them here. If you’re ready to craft your own plant paradise, what are we waiting for?

Assorted Plants With Trees In Garden

Landscaper’s Companion – Plant & Gardening Guide

A great app to help you with landscaping your backyard is Landscaper’s Companion. With a database of more than 26,000 plants and 21,000 photos, it can help provide you with a ton of information when considering which plants would look best in your yard. Unfortunately, right now, it’s only available for the iPhone.

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Backyard lit by outdoor lighting

Home Outside

Another great app that can help you give your yard a makeover is Home Outside. It’s available for both iPhone and Android. Its interface is super simple to use, which opens up the world of landscape planning to just about anyone. With this app, you can choose from 29 different palettes and over 700 different elements to create your ideal backyard sanctuary.

Just a few of the exceptional features you’ll find within the Home Outside app are various tools including an import function that allows you to import images of your home from Google Maps. It also has a sketch tool, which allows you to draw free-form shapes and garden beds.

Small garden room in backyard of home

PRO Landscape Home

PRO Landscape Home, which is available for both iPhone and Android, is similar to Home Outside in that you can take photos and import them into the app. You can then use elements from the app’s library to edit the image and see how things would look in real life if you incorporated them into your designs.

Just some of those elements include photos of flowers, trees, and shrubs that you can place on top of pictures of your backyard. In addition, you can resize every element and create custom areas with pavement, mulch, or grass. This app has a free version, but the paid one comes with a more extensive library of elements that can provide an incredible amount of variety in your designs.

ornamental grass border and landscape bench

iScape app

The iScape app has a free and paid version, and it’s available on both the iPhone and Android. Many consider it one of the most accessible landscaping apps to use, although it’s similar to other apps on this list in terms of features. For instance, you can import photos and then place various elements on those photos to get an idea of what a space might look like with them included. It’s perfect for envisioning a space before spending time or money creating it.

flower garden on a sloped landscape

Backyard & Gardening With Landscaping Designs

This landscape design app features an extensive database full of gardening and landscaping images that each have information on designs. You can look through pictures no matter if you’re looking to spruce up a small backyard or design a luxury one for your home. With that said, many think this app is better for creating inspiration rather thanapplying as a proper tool for design. That’s mainly because there’s not much to the app outside of its database of photos. However, if you are merely looking for inspiration, this app can help provide it.

Backyard of Residential Mansion
Photo by Max Vakhtbovych/Pexels

Spruce up your backyard

Your backyard obviously needs to be spruced up and beautified — or you wouldn’t be reading this article! Maybe you want to redesign the entire layout, or perhaps you just want to see where you might best place a little flower garden. With the apps above, you can create designs and share them with family, friends, and the contractor you’ve been thinking of hiring.

Getting feedback before beginning a project is a pretty wise thing to do. We think it’s worth checking out one or more of these apps to get a pretty realistic picture of what the final results of your landscaping might be.

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