Everyone’s talking about AI. So you might be wondering if it’s something you could use to help design your new garden. The short answer is yes. And no. This article will explain why.
(Note: most landscape designers would not write this article because it points you towards something they feel threatened by. Something that could put them out of work. But the truth is there is a way to use AI positively and constructively in the process of designing your new garden. A way that does not threaten a landscape designer but actually helps them. You’ll find this out at the end of this article. )
What can and can’t AI do?
The first thing to understand about AI that is relevant to this area is what it can and cannot do.
So AI does not create original things. It copies things. It draws on all the data it can access online and reprocesses it.
Basically it plagiarises. So when you ask it to design a garden for you, it will base its design on a combination of ideas it takes from other existing designs and existing gardens. So the biggest challenge with using AI is getting it to fully and properly understand your brief for your garden, what your needs and wants are and the challenges you face on your particular site.
Even if it could fully understand these, it will still try to force a design into your garden that simply might not work for a whole bunch of reasons. These can range from misunderstanding your personal tastes to the fact it doesn’t understand the very specific combination of council restrictions, slope, drainage and other issues that your block faces.
Understanding how AI works in garden design
To help you understand how AI would tackle the challenge of designing your garden, here’s an actual example.
If you opened up any AI chat tool and typed in something like “please design a garden for my backyard”, it would ask you some basic questions and you would get an answer back quite quickly. It would probably read well and included reassuring words like “tranquil” and “inviting”. It might include a paved seating area, some native plants and maybe a fire pit. It would definitely sound confident and professional because it is simply drawing on the language of garden design that currently sits on thousands of websites across the world. It knows how to “talk the talk” but can it “walk the walk”?
But when it creates your ‘design’ it doesn’t really understand your family’s personal preferences, what you hope to gain from the garden or your long-term plans. (Because it hasn’t sat down with you for a face-to-face consultation for an hour or two, like you would do with a human designer.) It does not know the specific opportunities and restrictions that your garden faces. It doesn’t know your soil or your drainage. And it might not know there is an easement that runs right through the middle of your garden, which restricts what can built over it.
Many of the things it will not know, are things that a trained, professional landscape designer or landscape architect would spot the instant they stepped onto your block. (And stepping onto your block is, of course, something else AI can’t do.)
But let’s take at what you get if AI does ask you at least some basic questions.
How to improve what you would get from AI.
Now AI works on the basis that the more information you give it, the better result you get out. So if you spent 20 minutes with it, giving it your block dimensions, orientation, the kids’ ages, the fact that you want to see the pool from the kitchen, your budget range and all the garden style references from Pinterest that you really like, you are going to get a more refined result.
It will be noticeably better. It might structure the design of your garden into zones. It might pick up on the pool-and-kitchen sightline and design around it.
So you might end up with something like this:
But what you have is still just a broad, sweeping, general overview of what your new garden might look from a plan and layout point of view. But there is nowhere near enough detail in something like this for you to give to landscaper to quote on. It’s just too broad, too general.
It lacks critical details that could mean, depending on the actual materials and construction methods used, the difference between a $100,000 garden and a $300,000 garden.
How others are using AI to influence their garden design
One of the AI tools that has moved genuinely fast in the garden design area are those tools that allow you to upload multiple photos of your garden, shot from different angles, and ask it to redraw your garden in a particular style.
You can choose to visualise what a Japanese style garden or Mediterranean courtyard or English cottage garden might look using your actual house as a backdrop. It does this very fast. (It’s a bit like those tools that can redecorate the inside of your house or picture wearing various different dresses or items of clothing.)
Again, while this is not a tool you could use to actually recreate your garden in a particular style, it does allow you to visualise various options. And this can help you look at different styles and react to them saying “yes that looks close” or “no, that feels wrong for my space.”
It’s a step that’s actually worth doing if you’re serious about your garden because it takes you beyond just looking at Pinterest or other examples of garden styles and trying to imagine them in your own space. (This is one of the things we actually recommend. More on that later.)
What to do next?
Now if you do all this, what do you end up with? Well you end up basically with just a “style” of garden, applied to your yard.
It’s not a garden design in any real sense of the word, because you can’t do anything with it. (Beyond use it to brief a real landscape designer or landscape architect.) It’s simply a product of AI.
It happens simply because of how AI works. In ‘designing’ your garden it has looked at thousands of Japanese gardens, or Mediterranean courtyards, and it is giving you a competent, recombined version of that style, dropped onto your block.
Now recognise that someone three suburbs over could type in the same brief to AI, upload a similar-sized yard, and get a design that looks like a sibling of yours. Same ingredients, same template, different address.
So how does this differ from working with an actual, human, landscape designer or landscape architect?
Well if you asked me, or one of our designers to start working on your garden, we would start from a completely different place. We wouldn’t ask you what style of garden you like as our first question.
We would begin with your family. Big questions like – How do you live now and how would you like to live in the future? More detailed questions like “what does it mean to you to be able to see the kids in the pool from the kitchen while you are cooking?” How did you cope last Christmas when 18 people turned up and there was nowhere for half of them to sit. If you’re a retiree, we might ask what you want your new garden to do for you in your later years.
Answers to these question, not a ‘style of garden’, are what really shape the garden we design for you. Our result is not a Japanese garden or a Mediterranean courtyard that happens to sit on your block. It is a portrait of how your family actually wants to live, built in plants and stone rather than colours.
That is the real difference between trying to use AI to design your garden and using a real garden designer. One gives you a product off the shelf, re-styled to your location. The other gives you something that reflects who you actually are, because it was built around you, your family and your lifestyle, not around a category of garden styles.
Where AI fails badly
Apart from all the issues to do with garden styles and your lifestyle choices, there are purely practical gaps that AI simply can’t cover. It cannot see the soil profile in your garden. It doesn’t know which services run under your yard or know that there is a council overlay which protects the large tree you have in the corner.
AI will render a beautiful deck for you, but one that sits too close to your boundary fence and would never get a planning or building permit. It will do this without blinking. It will show you what it thinks is a “$35,000 backyard transformation” that might actually cost $135,000 once real drainage issues, real engineering challenges, and a real pool builder are involved. It can draw you a picture. But it cannot test whether that picture can be built, on your land, for the money you actually have.
So how should you use AI in designing your garden?
Well, as we said at the start, there are very helpful ways you can use AI to ASSIST you, and us, in the process of designing your garden.
You can, for example, use ALL of the steps above, honestly.
Use the chat tools to get AI to ask you questions that you will need to brief your designer on when it comes time for a design consultation with them. (It helps you prepare for the session).
By all means use the photo rendering tools to test how you feel about different styles of garden. Using your house as a backdrop can help you choose which style you might prefer.
If you do all these things, when you arrive at your first design consultation with a real landscape designer or landscape architect, you will be in a much better position to brief us more thoroughly. We will already be able to see and understand what garden styles excite you, what features you have in mind, what aspects of a garden mean the most to you. This can make the whole process faster and easier for both of us.
Recognising the different between what AI can produce for you and what we human designers can produce is critical. Understand that using the above process gives you something that is a good starting point. But it’s not the same as a garden designed and built as a personal expression of everything your family hopes and dreams for. A garden that becomes not just a special place for your family. But a garden that has been tested against the practical realities of your block, your location, your soil, your budget and 35 years experience of learning from where things have gone wrong for others.
Please, play around with AI and have some fun with it. Let it help you find a direction that you can bring to us. A direction we will be able to bring to life for you, in a way it never could.
We will tell you honestly what it will cost. We will let you know whether it can be done on your block, with your soil. And we will plot a path that will turn it into something that is actually yours.
Your brief. Our expertise. Together we can create something that AI could never imagine.
