Mapping My Garden

Last year I decided to map my garden.  I have more than 150 irises (100+ named cultivars) and many hybridized daylilies, dahlias, hostas and many bulbs.

I started using an old version of Adobe Illustrator, but it was clear I needed to update and I was not willing to spend hundreds of dollars on a program that I would use rarely and certainly not professionally.  Along came ArtBoard.  For $25 I could do most of what I wanted.  Here's an example:

ArtBoard was fine, but one major drawback was the ability to import and export into other editable formats.  So I started looking for another affordable program. When I fond iDraw and saw that it had an iPad companion, I thought I'd give it a try.  So far so good.

Thanks to Google's ability to display satellite images I decided to use that to plot out a promotional view of my entire yard.  Last year the image was too low resolution and had distorting shadows.  I was also way to of date.  This year the resolution is much improved but still does not show all beds.  Despite my attempts to carefully measure and plot out each bed, the arial shot revealed my mistakes and now I am in the process of reworking it.