Welcome to November’s blog – all about extensions and plug-ins!
You already know how critical it is to streamline your workflow. When I first started out, I spent countless hours researching, experimenting, and trying to eliminate inefficiencies. That is exactly why this website exists—to provide you with the exact tools, knowledge, and practical resources you need to grow your professional garden design business smoothly and confidently.
One of the most powerful tools in a modern garden designer’s arsenal is SketchUp. With it you can transform complex spatial ideas into beautiful, 3D gardens for your clients. However, using SketchUp entirely "out of the box" can sometimes feel like digging a large border with a hand trowel.
To truly supercharge your design process, handle awkward topography, and generate flawless planting plans, you need to harness the power of plugins and extensions.
Below, I’m sharing an exclusive look at the indispensable plugins and extensions that I use day in and day out.
Mastering Site Surveys and Terrain
Dealing with levels and topography can be one of the most frustrating parts of the design process. Thankfully, a few brilliant extensions make short work of complex site data.
Fredo Topo Shaper: If you are working with contours or survey data, this plugin is vastly superior to SketchUp’s native sandbox tools. It generates clean meshes from iso-contours (as a QuadMesh) or directly from a Cloud of Points (as a Triangular Mesh). I use it every single time I start a new design.
Tig Point-Up: Perfect for small to medium designs especially if you only have the point levels in a PDF, or you took individual point levels in your own survey. You simply pick a point, enter your desired height above that point, and it sets it up for you. Join up the points to create contours.
Solid Inspector2: Survey meshes are notoriously prone to developing holes and geometry errors especially if you are using trims to create landscaping features. I use this extension to clearly identify and fix problems in my working meshes, keeping the model completely solid and clean.
Streamlining CAD Imports
Most garden design projects start with external survey files, and cleanup can take hours without the right tools.
PDF Importer (Paid): A massive time-saver. This extension allows you to import vector-based PDFs directly into SketchUp, accurately, and to scale. CAD drawings are notorious for not being to scale, so this give you an accurate base to scale everything else to.
Eneroth Flatten to Plane: When importing AutoCAD drawings, lines often end up scattered across different Z-levels. This tool flattens 3D objects perfectly into a 2D plane, making it much easier to trace and build your design base – if not doing that from the survey PDF.
Eneroth Face Creator: Once you’ve flattened your lines, this tool instantly generates faces in 2D so you don't have to manually redraw lines to close shapes.
Manipulating Geometry and Slopes
Once your base model is ready, these tools help you shape the landscape and see how your 2D concepts translate to real-world slopes.
Drop GC: This is an absolute lifesaver when pulling your 2D design into 3D. It drops a 2D plan layout directly onto a 3D terrain mesh. It is incredibly useful when you need to see exactly how a path or patio you’ve drawn looks on a real-world slope.
Soap Skin and Bubble: This tool creates a skin or rectangular mesh from joined lines, which you can then "inflate" to form mounds, curved faces, and organic topography. It is my go-to for creating natural-looking planting beds and stitching together awkward bits of a model.
Fredo Joint Push Pull: Native SketchUp can only push/pull flat faces. This extension allows you to perform extrusions of curved faces using various advanced methods. I use it all the time for constructing roofs, structures, or creating more organic landscape features.
Enhancing Workflow and Navigation
Small repetitive tasks add up. These plugins eliminate the friction of everyday modelling.
Components Finder: Finding the specific gates, furniture, or features you’ve saved on your computer can be clunky. This makes searching your local component library much easier and faster than using native tools.
Draw Pipes from Lines: A handy, simple utility that instantly turns any selected lines into 3D pipes or cylinders – you choose the radius. It's incredibly useful for making bespoke pergolas, railings, or frames.
Rotate Plan View: This tool rotates your top "Plan" view by a desired angle without permanently compromising or disrupting your default top-down setting. Perfect for setting up scenes for use in Layout.
Path Copy: Spacing items manually along a curve is tedious. This plugin allows you to place an object at multiple, perfectly even intervals along a path. It’s highly effective for placing edging bricks or staggering hedging and edging plants perfectly around a sweeping curve.
Solar North: Understanding light is fundamental to successful planting. This tool allows you to set and show the true solar north. When used alongside SketchUp's geolocation feature, it gives you highly accurate shadow animations so you can see exactly where shadows will fall at different times of the year.
Planting
Last but not least – there is only one tool I use for creating planting plans.
PLANT25 (Paid): If you only download one paid plugin, make it this one. It is an indispensable tool specifically built for our industry to produce planting plans, mood boards, and detailed schedules. It even manages pot sizes. This tool is relatively new and is adding more functionality all the time via regular updates.
Take Your Design Business to the Next Level
Investing a little time into getting to know these plugins will pay massive dividends in your business efficiency, freeing you up to spend less time fighting with software and more time doing what you love: designing beautiful spaces.
This list is just a small extract of the resources I have built to support you. Head over to the free downloads section, where you can download the complete, comprehensive list of essential plug-ins complete with all the links to take you directly to the download page.
If this list is useful to you then let me know - I would also love to hear about your must-have extensions and plug-ins in the comments below.
Kate Wolseley-Charles
The Garden Design Professional
