Apple / graphics_and_design / LANDSCAPE DESIGN: GARDEN PLAN
REVIEW
Landscape Design: Garden Plan is a sketchpad with a plant library bolted on.
A budget-friendly iPad tool for hobbyists who want to drag shrubs around a top-down yard map without learning CAD.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 4 MIN READ
Landscape design apps fall into two camps. One side targets the contractor — measured drawings, soil overlays, a plant list you can hand to a nursery. The other targets the homeowner with an iPad on a Saturday morning, a half-formed idea about ripping out the front lawn, and no patience for a learning curve. Landscape Design: Garden Plan is firmly in the second camp, and it knows it.
It treats your yard like a Keynote canvas, which is both the appeal and the ceiling. Within ten minutes you can have a recognisable top-down sketch of a flower bed with shrubs, a path, and a bench. Within an hour you’ll bump into the limit of what the plant library actually tells you, and you’ll be back in a browser tab looking up whether the hydrangea you placed will tolerate afternoon sun.
It treats your yard like a Keynote canvas, which is both the appeal and the ceiling.
FEATURES
The core loop is straightforward. Drop a rectangle for your lot, push the corners into shape, then pull plants, paving, fences, and furniture from a side drawer onto the canvas. Items snap loosely to a grid you can toggle, scale with two fingers, and rotate with a handle. Layers separate hardscape from planting so you can hide the patio while you fuss with the beds.
The plant library is the part that justifies the download. Each entry carries a thumbnail, a common and Latin name, and a one-line note on sun exposure and rough hardiness range. You can filter by category — trees, shrubs, perennials, grasses — and the search returns results fast enough that scrolling stays out of the way.
Output is the weak spot. Plans export as a flat PNG or a PDF with a legend; there's no live 3D walkthrough, no measured plant list with quantities, and no shopping export to a nursery. A pricing page inside the app gates a small set of premium textures and extra plant entries behind a one-time unlock.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The drawing surface itself is genuinely pleasant on an iPad with a Pencil. Pan and zoom are smooth, undo is unlimited within a session, and the snap behaviour is soft enough that you can nudge a shrub a few inches without fighting the grid.
Pricing is honest. The free tier covers a single project and the basic plant set; the paid unlock is a one-time charge in the low double digits rather than the rolling subscription the category usually defaults to. For a weekend bed redesign, that's the right shape of transaction.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The plant data is shallow. There's no mature-size cone, no companion-planting warnings, no zone-by-zone bloom calendar — none of the agronomy that turns a sketch into a plan that survives July. iScape, the category's incumbent, ships an AR overlay and a measured shopping list; this app ships neither.
Project portability is also thin. You can't import a satellite photo of your lot as a traced underlay, the file format is proprietary, and there's no iCloud sync between devices. Lose the iPad and you've lost the design.
CONCLUSION
Install this if you want a $0 way to push shapes around a top-down yard map and you're comfortable doing the plant research elsewhere. Skip it if you need accurate measurements, a real plant database, or anything you'd hand to a contractor. iScape remains the app to beat once your project gets serious.