About GardenRunner
Good garden decisions shouldn’t require a designer’s fee.
GardenRunner is a free garden-design consultant for homeowners. Describe your yard — the sun and shade, the soil, the slope, the deer, what you want it to become — and it reasons out a real, location-specific plan: the right plants, a printable planting plan, work lists, and a budget you can phase over seasons.
It’s not a drawing app, and it’s not a pretty picture with nothing behind it. It’s the expert-judgment part of hiring a designer — the thinking — offered to you for free.
The belief behind it
A good yard changes how it feels to live somewhere. But the judgment that makes a yard work — which plants actually thrive in your conditions, how to phase the cost, what to fix first — has mostly sat behind a designer’s invoice. Plenty of homeowners are willing to do the work, or hand a clean plan to a contractor. What they’ve been missing is the reasoning. We think that reasoning shouldn’t be a luxury. So we built it, and we made it free.
How GardenRunner is different
- It’s a reasoning brain, not a drawing tool.
- It reads your actual site and works out a plan that fits your conditions and goals — not a CAD canvas, not a photo-redesign with no thinking behind it.
- It’s location- and goal-specific.
- Plants are ranked for your sun, soil, drainage, wind, and deer pressure — and for your blend of goals, whether that’s pollinators, low maintenance, curb appeal, privacy, or all at once.
- It’s honest by design.
- No plant makes the list without a reason you can see. Risks become cautions with alternatives, never silent exclusions. Every assumption is labeled by confidence. And it never takes payment to recommend a plant — rankings reflect fit, not who pays.
- It’s actually actionable.
- You leave a consult with a printable planting plan, DIY or contractor work lists, quantities, and a budget you can spread across seasons — not just inspiration.
Why we built it
Good Minded — the nonprofit behind GardenRunner — runs on a simple belief: good things shouldn’t be held back by budgets, so it funds free technology through a do-well-to-do-good model. A landscape designer’s judgment is one of those good things: knowing which plants actually thrive in your yard, what to fix first, how to phase the cost. It’s always sat behind an invoice. So we built that reasoning into a tool and gave it away.
A Good Minded product
GardenRunner is a Good Minded product — free to use, funded by donations, built on a do-well-to-do-good model. There’s no paywall and there never will be. You create a free account to run a consult, and if GardenRunner helped you, there’s a gentle way to support the mission. The support keeps it free for the next homeowner staring at a blank yard.