Might help

Here is a link that might be useful: Audio Ency.

Hope this helps

Here is a link that might be useful: pronanciation of botanical names

OK, I bought Sierra Custom Landesigner last night for $19.99 at Staples (Business Depot)! (At Best Buy, they only had the Broderbund design software for $69.99, which you can get for a few dollars on ebay. It seemed to have gotten horrible reviews, so I decided not to go with it.)

YES, THEIR ENCYCLOPEDIA HAS AUDIO FILES WITH THE CORRECT PRONUNCIATION OF EACH PLANT IN THEIR DATABASE!!! Pretty neat.

I like Sierra so far. There was no pre-designed house style that matched mine, so I created it from scratch, and it only took a few hours for me to figure out what I was doing with ease. (For someone who is not very familiar with graphics software at all, it might take a little longer, but the instructions are pretty straightforward.)

They have a large database of plants that I can drag and drop into my landscape and move around in a matter of seconds, rather than having to erase and re-draw and re-measure constantly. This will be useful for planning and keeping track of the location of my spring bulbs as well.

If there's a plant I have that they don't have in their database, I simply select a similar-looking plant, or a "generic" plant, and enter the relevant data of my plant to get the visual scale right.

The walk-throughs are pretty nifty for getting a very general idea of what your plan will look like.

The only thing I haven't figured out, is how to place one object on top of another in such a way that the smaller object underneath still appears from the "top" view (as opposed to being visible only from the side view).

The ability to move from season to season is slightly helpful, although it's not completely smooth or 100% accurate -- it has my weigela in flower in the early spring, for example, rather than later in the season. It also has my pansies die out by fall, which in fact does not happen in my area -- they bloom right through to winter.

It certainly isn't "photo-realistic", and it would be nonsensical to expect it to be so. It's just a really great way to quickly plan out your garden scheme with some colour and form simulation. Great investment for me!!!