A Good Minded product
Describe your yard — sun, soil, slope, deer, what’s next to what — and GardenRunner reasons out a plan that fits your site and your goals, with the "why" shown for every plant.
Free to use. Account required. No paywall — just a gentle ask to support the work.
A tag says "full sun, zones 5–9." It doesn’t know your soil turns to clay after rain, that the deer treat your beds like a salad bar, or that the west side bakes while the north side never dries out. So you guess, you plant, and some of it dies.
The alternative has been hiring a landscape designer — a big spend for "just some plants," and out of reach for a lot of homeowners. There’s been nothing in between. That’s the gap GardenRunner fills.
Drawing and CAD apps make you the expert and just draw what you tell them. AI photo apps generate a nice-looking picture with little real thinking about deer, shade, or drainage underneath it.
GardenRunner is the part in the middle everyone skips: the expert judgment. It reads your actual site and reasons to a plan the way a good designer would — weighing conditions against goals, showing its work, and telling you where it’s confident and where it’s guessing.
How GardenRunner works
No renders, no 3D flythrough — a consulting brain that reads your site, weighs what you want, and hands you a scored, phased plan you can plant yourself or take to a pro.
Sun, soil, drainage, deer pressure — read from what you tell us and a few smart defaults.
Every guess is labeledSlide what matters — pollinators, privacy, low upkeep, natives. These become the weights.
You set the prioritiesA ranked list built to your goals and site — each plant showing the “why” behind its score.
Nothing without a reasonFit it to your number and split it into phases — structure first, fill and pollinators next.
Built around your budgetA printable planting plan, plus DIY and contractor work lists — export it all, yours to keep.
Yours to export & keepEvery recommendation carries its factors, its score, and its "why." The value isn’t a list of plants — it’s understanding why these plants, for your yard.
Risks surface as labeled cautions, each with alternatives and, where relevant, a fix that removes the constraint.
A deer fence, a windbreak, drip, limbing up a tree — each shown with cost, effort, and permanence. The big, irreversible moves always ask before assuming.
When it has to guess — soil type, a sun estimate — it says so and tells you how to confirm. You always know how much to trust the plan.
Rankings reflect fit for your yard and goals — never who pays. Funded by donations, not placement fees.
GardenRunner is a Good Minded product — free to use, funded by donations, built on a do-well-to-do-good model. You create a free account to run a consult, and there’s a gentle ask to support the work. No paywall, no locked features, no "upgrade to see the good part."
If it helps you build a garden you love, a donation keeps it free for the next person.
You bring the space and the goals. It brings a designer’s judgment — and shows its work.