GMG's Friday Find: Plan Your Spring Garden NOW with the Virtual Garden Designer

Since the days are growing shorter and the winter months are looming, it may be hard to remember how bright and colorful your garden looked just a few months ago. Now is a great time to start dreaming and planning ahead of how your garden could look next spring. 

Perhaps you bought, planted and potted flowers without a plan.  I know I I've done this, sometimes with luck, sometimes without.  Rather than waste your money on guesswork planting, spend some time this winter with Suntory's new Virtual Garden Designer Tool and create the garden of your dreams.

Now professional landscape design help is just a click away with this free online tool that lets you "test drive" color and plant choices before making the purchase. The Virtual Garden Designer is a simple drag and drop online tool that lets you compare flower color combinations planted as a group in a particular area, in containers, or spread across an entire yard.

First choose one of several planting areas in a virtual landscape, make your flower selections and drop them into the selected garden spot.  A thumbnail of the garden illustrates the plant combinations.  Want to see them?  Just click OK and you'll see how they will look fully grown. This is very helpful, who hasn't planted flowers that grew smaller or larger than expected!  Want to experiment?  Click the clear button and start over, playing with plant color and forms again and again until you achieve your perfect design look. It's tons of fun besides being a terrific blueprint for your future purchases.

Some garden design tips are certainly helpful.  Use just one color in large swathes of the garden border or in garden islands.  The Surfinia® Trailing Petunias, for example, create waves of spreading color for a bold and stunning look.  Repeating that bold color in smaller plantings or in combination containers brings a cohesiveness to the landscape.  The Virtual Garden Designer tool offers more than 20 types of plants from The Suntory Collection and many colors within each plant type to create subtle repeating of color.

Go for broke and add at least one large showstopper of a plant, either hanging in a container or growing up a trellis.  The Sun Parasol® Mandevillas come in a variety of colors and sizes with tubular tropical flowers and glossy green leaves that truly add the 'wow' effect to your design...I went a little crazy and added 3 to my design!  

Have some fun this winter playing with the Virtual Garden Designer from The Suntory Collection to help save you time and money come spring when you enter your garden center, because this time you'll have a plan and won't be overwhelmed like a kid in a candy store. Give it a try, we'd love to see some of  your creative designs!

~Peggy
Garden Media Group