Tool
Garden bed designer (drag-and-drop)
Sketch a bed at scale. Drag plants from the sidebar onto the grid. Each plant uses its actual mature spread to show realistic spacing. Save your layout as an image or share a link with your design embedded.
Free · No signup · Plant data from our 53-species warehouseDrag plants from the left onto the bed. Each circle = mature spread at scale. Click a placed plant to remove it.
How to use this
The math comes from each plant's mature spread in the warehouse. A daylily takes about 2 ft of space; a peony 3 ft; a Japanese maple 15 ft. Tags in nurseries are routinely wrong about mature size — for shrubs and trees, the warehouse value is the typical landscape-scale figure, not the catalog "compact" claim.
Two practical tips:
- Don't overfill. Plants need air circulation. A bed that looks sparse in year 1 is correctly spaced for year 3.
- Heights step from back to front. The designer doesn't enforce this but you should — tallest plants at the back of a one-sided bed, tallest in the center of an island bed.