Sow: Garden & Landscape Design

Sow Platforms, Inc. today detailed Sow, an app that carries a garden or landscape project from first idea through to season-long care. Sow is available on iPhone and iPad, on Android, and as a full web app at usesow.com. It is free to download.

A single outdoor project has typically meant assembling a handful of unrelated apps: one to identify a plant, another to work out what is wrong with it, another to sketch a bed, another to track the watering, another for the forecast. None of them share what they know, so the plant list never reaches the layout and the diagnosis never reaches the care schedule. Sow is organized instead around the three things the project actually asks for — discovering an idea, turning it into a plan, and keeping the result alive.

For the first, Sow creates designs from a photo of the user’s own yard and composes them from a catalog of more than 12,000 real outdoor plants: trees, shrubs, perennials, grasses, natives and named cultivars carried by nurseries, filtered to the user’s hardiness zone, sun exposure and space. This addresses a specific failure of current AI home-and-garden tools, which produce an attractive render and no way to act on it — the plants in those images are generated rather than selected, so they have no name, no hardiness rating and no price. Alongside the designer sits a feed of other gardeners’ real yards rather than stock photography.

For the second, the design remains a working document. Sow’s Editor — among the most used parts of the app — is a drag-and-drop surface where plants, furniture and materials are placed by hand and then moved, resized, rotated and layered. It ships with more than 250 non-plant items, from outdoor furniture and fire pits to water features, lighting, pergolas and pools, plus material swatches for brick, stone, pavers, gravel, mulch and lawn, so a plan covers the hardscape as well as the planting. Objects snap in 15-degree increments as they rotate and furniture is drawn from every side, and a finished design can be upscaled in-app for presenting or printing. Any plant in it can be tapped for its mature height and spread, hardiness range, water and sun needs, bloom season and current nursery pricing. Beyond the Editor, Sow produces planting plans bed by bed, maps a whole property over satellite imagery, and measures the site itself: its AR sunlight meter traces the sun’s path from a chosen point in the yard, accounting for the trees, fences and rooflines that shade it, and estimates the hours of direct light that spot receives.

For the third — the part most design apps stop short of — Sow identifies an unknown plant from a photo, and Plant Doctor diagnoses an unhealthy plant or lawn from one, returning likely causes and treatment steps. A garden journal and per-space records track what was planted where and how it has fared; bloom and seed-starting calendars say when to act; and care reminders arrive as dated tasks. In the United States those tasks are weather-aware, drawing on local forecasts, rainfall history, drought conditions and frost dates.

The app serves homeowners and professional landscape designers from the same tool. Homeowners get a credible picture of a space before committing money to it, and the means to look after it afterwards; designers get client-ready visuals with a real plant schedule underneath, plus branded presentations, proposals and client sign-off in Sow Pro+. Designs, plants, maps and records sync between the mobile apps and the web app, so a plan sketched standing in a bed can be finished at a desk.

Gardeners have created more than 95,000 designs in Sow to date. The iPhone app holds a 4.3-star App Store rating across 385 ratings.

Sow is available now on the App Store for iPhone and iPad running iOS 17.0 or later, on Google Play for Android 7.0 and later, and in any modern browser at usesow.com.

The app is free to download. Sow Pro is $59.99 per year following a seven-day free trial, and Sow Pro+ is $99.99 per year. Monthly plans and one-time credit packs are also available in-app. Sow carries no advertising and does not share personal data with ad networks.

Plant matching works to USDA hardiness zones in the United States, Canadian hardiness zones, RHS hardiness ratings in the United Kingdom and Australian climate zones. The weather-aware element of care guidance — forecasts, rainfall history, drought conditions and frost dates — is currently United States only.