Great software bargains are to be had at Half Price Books. Their stock consists primarily of discontinued versions. You’re not getting the most up-to-date software, but then you’re not paying up-to-date prices, either. The software is mostly new, and comes with a 30-day guarantee to be free of defects.

There are four stores in San Antonio:
11654 Bandera Road Suite 106, San Antonio, TX 78250 (210) 647-1103
3207 Broadway, San Antonio, TX 78209 (210) 822-4597
11255 Huebner Rd., San Antonio, TX 78230 (210) 558-3247
125 N.W. Loop 410, San Antonio, TX 78216 (210) 349-1429

I bought three landscape design programs at the Half Price Books on Broadway. Decide for yourself whether I got great deal or wasted $40 and a day of product testing.

1. Instant Landscaping

This is a 4 CD-ROM set that contains four separate software programs: Instant Landscape; Burpee 3D Garden Designer; Colorful Water-Wise Gardening and Gardener’s Journal. Two of the programs are keepers, the other two are a waste of disk space, but you can’t beat the price! They claim that it’s a $119 value with an estimated $29.99 street price.

If all you want is the Instant Landscape Software, a better deal is Topics Software’s 2-CD set, which includes version 7 of the program contained in this box PLUS a similar program to help you design decks and hot tubs. Get that one at COMP USA (in the rack of bargain disks near the cash register) for $9.99. If you decide you want the garden Journal as well, this box is the better deal.

Instant Landscaping (ver. 6)

This computer-aided design program, the centerpiece of the 4-CD-ROM set, helps you visualize an attractive and sustainable garden.

You can use their standard graphics or import a photo (or photos) of your own. In figure (1) you can see a small area of our back yard, nestled between a small deck (still under construction) and a wooden fence. The whole area is 6’ across by 9’ wide. It’s edged by Texas mountain laurel in a bed of Asian jasmine, and along the fence there are four Italian cypresses in green ceramic pots interspersed with three Belinda roses planted in the ground. Lady Banksia Roses (badly in need of pruning) tumble across the fence. Oh yes – and a birdfeeder. It’s the part of the back yard you see first when you walk in the back gate, and is also visible from the sunroom. I want something attractive here, which used to be a huge square of weedy St. Augustine grass. This is the photo I imported.

Figure (2) is a screen capture of my “completed” little garden. I dragged in a few boulders, a bench, a fountain edged by pansies, a butterfly bush and a butterfly weed, a little mound of daisies, three varieties of stonecrop, a bunch of gamma grasses and a little stone path. Whew! I really went to town, didn’t I!

This was a fun and easy program to use. To place the plants and architectural features, I just dragged them from the CD-ROM and manipulate them to fit. You were supposed to be able to drag-and-drop supplementary photos from a Web site, but I couldn’t get this feature to work. You can also import your own photos from other sources. There is a button for “plant properties” that will tell you the names of the plants, care instructions, hardiness zone and the ultimate size it will attain.

There’s a series of slick little videos that teach you the more difficult procedures, and help is available at every step. The results were very realistic.

The hard part of this program, I found, was getting everything into proportion. Quite frankly, I’d need a plot four times this size to cram all this stuff in. I could have overlain a grid and have been a little more careful about getting the sizes right, but the temptation is to stuff, stuff, stuff, and there’s noting to keep you from doing it.

All in all, though, a worthwhile program that helped me think through a design for my little garden plot.

Gardener’s Journal
This one will be a keeper. I’ve always meant to keep a garden journal. What is that rose? Where did I buy it? What care does it take? When did I prune it last (hint: here in San Antonio, prune your roses on Valentine’s Day.) Maybe this program will inspire me to be a more faithful journaler.

The journal is a specialized database for your garden. You can make journal entries every day, including information about weather – even the phase of the moon! – and log in what you did that day. You can add your own photos, videos and audio clips. There’s a button that lets you turn your journal into a Web page: it creates a new page for each month of your journal (you provide your own Web space and FTP software to upload the page.) You can print reports and share journals with friends. The entire database is searchable, so if you are looking for all journal entries that contain the word “frost” or “pumpkin” you could easily get right to them.

There are additional categories to log in the seeds you plant and the plants you buy. Version 1 is included with the Instant Landscaping package. Version 3.1 is now available and looks a bit nicer. You can upgrade to the Home (list $39.99) or Professional (list $49.99) version of the software for only $15.99 by going to their Web site.

Burpee 3-D Garden Designer
I’ve been eyeballing this program for a few years now: I grew up a few miles from Burpee headquarters near Philadelphia and always thought of it as my local seed company. I still love Burpee’s seeds and plants, but their software is verminous. This disk is the Millennium edition, and I applaud their good ruthlessness in pruning it from the marketplace.

The centerpiece of the program is the 3D designer, and this is where it suffers from root rot. The concept is great: start with a 1-foot per-square grid, drag plants from the encyclopedia into the grid and view your design in 3D. The 3-D rendering is primitive and the viewing angle was bizarre. I dropped in a ligustrum hedge, intending it to be a nicely clipped, straight-line living fence. Instead, it showed me a curved monstrosity, badly in need of an energetic session with the pruning shears. I tried adding a walkway -- faux brick would look nice – and got a skinny gray splotch.

The garden design guide is a total of five scraggly screens. Big whoop. The encyclopedia and questions and answers are nice enough, but you’d be better off buying a decent book.

This one was uprooted from my computer

Colorful Water-Wise Gardening
Gardeners who live in San Antonio, where we get 30 inches of rainfall a year (all of it is scheduled to fall on Tuesday, by the way) are interested in water-wise gardening. This is a strange little program: really a Website on a disk. It doesn’t have much basic information about xeriscaping in it, just plant lists. I found disconcerting errors: looking for a yellow flower, it took me to a photo of a red hollyhock; the temperature zone map had skewed colors, which put San Antonio climate on par with the Klondike.

If this was a Web site I might recommend it, but as a CD it’s more trouble than it’s worth. If you want to learn about this topic, I suggest reading Water-Wise Gardening by Thomas Christopher (1994, Simon & Schuster.)

2. Custom 3D Land Designer

This 3-CD-Rom Set is billed as five programs in one. A 3D land designer; photo garden designer; a garden encyclopedia, designer garden library and a landscape design guide.

Sierra Photo Garden Designer
I used the same garden photo that I used in the Instant Landscape program and came up with a totally different design, complete with a very fat cat. (figure 3.) This has a sort of Italianate feel: an large ornamental grass and a salvia, a few clumps of sage, two agapanthus (I had to look that up: it’s an African lily), a strawberry jar filled with herbs, a low row of lavender filling in the gap between the planters and the path. A few boulders casually tossed around. A trellis in the back. A market umbrella mounted on the deck. The crowning touch, I think, is the lion’s head fountain mounted to the fence. Once again, over the top.

In some ways, this is a much more rudimentary program than Instant Landscaping. There doesn’t seem to be a scale to proportion things correctly and there are no plant descriptions or care instructions (once you drag a plant in, you can see its name by right clicking on it, but that’s it.) It was easy and fun to use and there were more objects to choose from (I held myself back from putting in an arbor, a deer and the statue of Michelangelo’s David.)

The color and texture of objects can be easily customized. The market umbrella was originally green. I tried red, and settled on green. It was harder to resize the umbrella. By convention, if you “grow” a graphic by tugging on a corner, it changes size proportionally. In this program, it distorts the graphic. Took me a while to figure that out.

This program was fun and helped me conceptualize some ideas, but because of its lack of plant details, it’s more of a toy than a tool for serious gardeners.

Garden Encyclopedia
This is a wonderful program for one main reason: it contains audio files that have the pronunciation of the Latin names of every entry in the 3,000-plant database. I learned, to my astonished embarrassment that kalanchoe is pronounced kal-ann-KO-ee, not kal-ANN-cho. How was I to know?

There are also dozens of lovely photo albums arranged by category (i.e., labor saving perennials, plants that stand neglect, plants for hot sun, plants that attract butterflies, fun plants for kids) and the ability to add plants to a list and print it out to take to the garden center. There’s a section on caring for plant that contains short videos on topics such as dividing perennials and starting seeds.

This is a well-thought out program and well worth the price of the entire package.

Land Designer 3D
The CD would not install on my computer so I stuck it on my husband’s. We both have similar Dell’s running Windows XP, so I don’t know what the glitch was, although I suspect it a conflict about video resolution. It also crashed a few times.

All that being said, this is a far, far better program than the Burpee 3D program. It’s meant to design an entire yard, starting with entering the details of your plot, setting the orientation, adding slopes and hills.

You could add a photo of your own home, but it won’t be rendered in 3D and you will lose most of the 3D advantages. They have a nice selection of pre-drawn homes, or you can create a 3D home roughly resembling yours by adding elements like stone walls, doors and windows, chimneys, dormers, paint colors and hardscaping. Finally, you add the plants.

There is a database of 4,600 plants and 2,200 objects that you can plunk into your landscape. You can take a 3-D tour or a birds-eye view and twirl everything around to look at it at every angle. You can see how the plants you selected will change through the seasons and see how your landscaping will grow and change over the years.

One interesting feature is the ability to design a drip irrigation system. For anything in the landscape, you can create a shopping list to help track costs.

Also included on this CD is the designer garden library and landscape design guide, which will help you achieve an aesthetically pleasing and geographically appropriate design. It’s nicely done, but I have landscape books that are much more thorough.

It would take me a few days of intense study to feel comfortable using this program. I’m not convinced the results are worth it.

3. Total 3D Landscape Deluxe

I played with this program for about an hour, right after I used Land Designer 3D. It suffered greatly in comparison. This program gives you a much more primitive house: no doors or windows, for starters. The plant choices are fewer: the annual plant choices are tuft and upright. That’s it. Tufted or upright.

I found it very confusing to use, even with the accompanying 180-page user manual. The data is read off of the CD and consequently the program is exceedingly slow.

Although it’s meant to be a landscaping program, only about 3 pages of the manual deal with plants and their placement. The rest was about building the house that will not look like your house and does not have a door or windows. Why bother?

The plant database was nice enough but the one in Sierra’s Land Designer was ten times better and more usefully organized. Although the plant database is integrated into the program, it doesn’t interact with it: you can’t read about lobelia and then drag-and drop one into your landscape.

You can see my test house – an hour’s worth of tedious work – at figure (4). The program has been upgraded since this version (which came out in 2002) and the newer version might be more robust. This program ended up in the compost pile.

The surprise value in the box was Black and Decker’s Landscape Design and Construction software. This is the piece missing from all the software I’ve reviewed so far: building the hardscape, walls and other garden features. The topics covered are water gardens, walls, walks and steps, arbors and trellises, patios, grading and fences.

As one would expect from Black & Decker the instructions are clear and the presentation outstanding. In the wall section for example, you can determine whether you need a retaining wall or a freestanding wall. Under freestanding walls, you can view information about footings, adding lattice panels to the top of a wall, working with cinder block, and adding a stucco or stone veneer. If you select stucco, you can view a detailed slide show about applying stucco, print out a materials list and even use an onboard calculator to see how much Portland cement you need to buy. Very spiffy.

If you are a do-it-yourselfer, this program is both entertaining and informational.

So what’s the verdict? For less than $40 (I get a 10 percent discount at Half Price Books when I flash my Texas Public Radio membership card) I bought three software packages that contained nine landscape design programs. That’s less than $5 apiece. I’ll probably use three or four of them again, and I learned a lot about the strengths and weaknesses of various landscaping programs. What a deal!