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January 7, 1999
Virtual Gardening: Losing More Than Calluses
By KATHERINE WHITESIDE
ake no mistake: making a garden is outdoor work. So I was a bit skeptical of garden design software promising that ""you can create an outdoor paradise without leaving your chair."" I have been a garden writer for 16 years and, for the last 6 have been wrestling a one-acre plot into some sort of garden that makes design sense.
So I know that I can write about gardens without leaving my chair, but creating an outdoor paradise means I have to get up and get out there.
Donna Paul
Gardening software is supposed to help users explore landscape designs, although few would attempt something as complex as this garden.
Overview Virtual Gardening: Losing More Than Calluses
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But checking out a few brand-new tools is always appealing. I am redesigning the stone entryway into our garden, and maybe one of these programs could streamline my usual technique of hauling stuff around the yard until it looks right. I have some pictures ripped out of magazines, and I've scribbled down some ideas on paper, but it could be a terrific time saver to have a garden design program that shows me how the new entrance will look before I start lugging those big rocks.
Plus, as the first snows start falling, a design program might hold some appeal for the many garden enthusiasts who are already thinking ahead to next spring and want to get a jump on their plans.
Because I know a lot more about gardening than I do about computers, I examined these programs with Paul Heuston, a consultant in software development for training and education who has extensive experience with computer-driven interactive teaching. In addition, Paul has a lovely old house and a three-acre undeveloped garden that he has been bugging me about for two years. Other great helpers in these reviews were Brian Higley, a landscape architect; Madison Cox, a principal in Madison Cox Designs, an international garden design firm, and Anne Symmes, a garden designer who is a graduate of the New York Botanical Garden Landscape Design Program.
Our review team was large, and each of us had real reasons for wanting these design programs to work. But in the end, all the programs had at least one major area of underdevelopment that canceled out any hopes for usefulness, even though various programs handled some aspects of gardening fairly well.
Higley summed up our joint frustration by saying, ""You can hand a person all the hammers, files and nails that a blacksmith uses, but unless that person knows horses, the shoe is just not going to go on that hoof.""
Still, gardening people are eternally optimistic. At the end of the review process, we brainstormed on what sort of software would truly be helpful for both amateur and professional garden makers. We agreed that one would be a good plant encyclopedia, compiled by a botanical garden or some other reliable source.
Cox found the CD-ROM of Michael A. Dirr's Photo-Library of Woody Landscape Plants (Plant America; $149.95) to be useful. Ms. Symmes agreed and said she was considering buying it. She mentioned that she had looked at the Plant Master 5.0 CD-ROM (Acacia Software, $350), a database intended for landscape professionals that includes a catalogue of more than 5,000 North American plants, at a New York Botanical Garden symposium on gardening software and liked the fact that Plant Master could be tailored to the needs of the user.
We tacked on a wish for a CD-ROM on garden history -- perhaps a combination of The Oxford Companion to Gardens, Thacker's History of Gardens and other classic references. With that, the three professionals left -- one to inspect 20 antique apple trees, another to conduct a site visit and the last to finish a watercolor for a client presentation.
I went home and lugged rocks around the garden.
Katherine Whiteside is a gardening writer. A book she wrote with Madi son Cox on garden design will be published by Henry Holt this year.
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