If you have a garden which needs a makeover, one solution would be to hire a professional designer to take a look, spend some time coming up with a solution, source all the components and hire people to make the design a reality. Either way, depending on the size of your garden and requirements, it's an expensive process.

One alternative is a tool such as Garden Planner. The Planner enables you to select the size and dimension of your (potential) garden, then sit down and configure as required. Of course, as it's all on the computer, you can easily move flowers, change the layout until you are happy.

Garden Planner includes thousands of pre-designed flowers, shrubs, vegetables and fruit components which you can drop into your design. You can add a pathway, drive, ornaments, a shed and even a pool. You can even drop in a huge water fountain as your centrepiece and then design your garden off the back of this.

Of course, Garden Planner isn't limited to novices wanting to save some money. If you're a horticulturist or botanist, you can use the tool to design for your clients. Even professional landscape designers could potentially use Garden Planner to design for their clients. The only issue might be when you print the computer-generated design for the client and they were expecting a design by hand, on paper. But, you could use Garden Planner to at least put your ideas on screen, before turning the final design in to a sketch you present to your clients.