How to Create a Landscape Design

Set the Scale

Each landscape design template has a default scale set to 1 inch = 8 feet. You can change the scale in the SmartPanel using the Document Setup section. You can switch to a metric scale or set your own custom scale.

Create a Boundary

To create a boundary, click on the Wall tool at the top of the SmartPanel. Click once in your work area to begin drawing and then stretch the wall to length that you desire. Continue adding more boundary lines to define your space. To get out of wall mode, hit the select button or click the Esc button on your keyboard. You can adjust the dimensions of the space you just created by resizing each boundary manually or click on the dimension value of any boundary and type in your desired length.

Add Texture

If you used the wall tool to create an enclosed space, you can add a photo-realistic texture to it to show an area meant to be used for grass, bricks, paving stones or whatever surface your plan calls for. Select the area, click on Fill on the Home ribbon, and select Textures from the dropdown.

Add Landscape Features

Just like adding furniture and appliances to your floor plan, SmartDraw makes it easy to add lawn furniture, greenery and a vast assortment of landscape features like pools, fountains, footpaths, and even koi ponds. Each template comes with a few libraries of common landscape symbols docked to the left of your drawing area. If you see the feature you want there, just select it and drag it to where you want it to go.

Search for Additional Symbols

To search for additional symbols, just type any words in the Search for symbols box. The search results will be grouped by the libraries they were found in.

You can drag and drop symbols directly from the search results into your landscape design.

Click on the plus sign next to any group of results and you can either choose Add result or Add library for future use. Add result only adds the symbols that matched your query. Add library will add the entire library the symbols were found in.

Add Text

The Text tool allows you to indicate what is intended for certain areas and to specify the types of plants, trees and flowers that you want. Just click on the Text button in the SmartPanel and type. You can also use the Line tool to draw an arrow to indicate what it references. First, draw the type of line you want: straight, curved or segmented, then click on Line Style in the Home tab to add arrowheads.

Add Color

Once a shape is in your workspace, you can change line and fill color in the Home tab to add some color to your design.

A lot of landscape design symbols are a combination, grouped object with a mix of shapes and lines. 

You can change the fill color using the Fill options on the Home tab.

Change Line Color

You can change the line color using the Line Style menu on the Home tab. 

Share Your Landscape

Like every other SmartDraw document, you can export your landscape as an image file, a PDF, or directly to any Microsoft Office^® document like PowerPoint^®, Word^® and Outlook.

You can also share your design by emailing someone a link. They'll be able to view your design even if they don't have SmartDraw.

Creating detailed and visually rich landscapes and sharing them with landscapers, office park managers, urban planners or whoever you need to reach, is quick and easy with SmartDraw.