Design your perfect garden on your PC using Windows Vista

The prospect of ‘becoming a gardener’ can seem quite daunting. You have to know what type of flora to plant, what their growth times are, which seasons to do what, how to juxtapose colours – and more. To start, you might meander on over to www.greenfingers.com or www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/C876 where you’ll find several straightforward guides for the beginner.

A rich resource for learners and experts alike is the easily customisable and handy Windows Vista desktop Sidebar, where you can install a web feed to suit your exact requirements and levels of expertise. For the keen gardener, a constantly updated and live feed is available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/newsfeed/rss/gardening.xml.

In The Know - The Telegraph offers an RSS feed that includes up-to-date headlines, advice and columns

There’s also an abundance of software that will help you to design, organise and understand your garden. Garden Organizer Deluxe (www.download3000.com/download-Garden_Organizer_Deluxe-count-reg-76.html) gives you all the tools you need to start and maintain your garden in a freely downloadable demo (see the walkthrough opposite), while Complete Gardens (£24.95 from www.complete-gardens.co.uk) is an interactive CD-ROM that helps enthusiasts find plants for every aspect of a garden and season.

Manage your garden

Once you’ve figured out how it all works, you’re going to need to keep track of everything. The calendar in Windows Vista makes it easy to organise and manage what you need to do.

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Using your calendar is also a good method of ensuring that you don’t overuse one patch of soil from year to year, and that you vary your colours if you have a more floral garden.

Click Away - Complete Gardens helps you to find a plant by its characteristics; great for novice gardeners

Many gardeners love to travel from one gardening centre to the next, carefully choosing their bulbs or seedlings. But you may prefer to have things come to you. Sites such as www.e-garden.co.uk and www.gonegardening.com/gg_shop/ have everything you need – from bulbs to pitchforks – only one mouse click away.

Or you can liaise with, be inspired by, or even just watch the daily lives of other gardeners as they muddle on through, by reading their gardening blogs (www.britblog.com/directory/interest/gardening.html). For those who think that even looking at a gardening trowel is too close to exhausting, click on over to www.cyke.com/garden.swf and build yourself a virtual garden. You’ll be pleased to see it requires little more than a relaxed index finger and a good whisky.

Tamsin MacKay contributes to Windows Vista: The Official Magazine, and works as a freelance journalist.

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