Landscaping Photographs Online
Internet sites that offer landscape pictures vary significantly.
Many internet sites offer garden landscape photographs for inspiration and design ideas. Here is a selection of them reviewed on cost, user-friendliness and practicality.
Overview
Many internet sites offer garden landscape photographs for inspiration and garden design ideas. The difficult task for anyone wanting to use web-based landscape pictures as a landscape design tool is accepting site limitations as well as aspect of the site's photographic stock. These sites vary widely in:
- Cost – some require no charge for access to garden photos; others request a fee or membership.
- User-friendliness – sites jam-packed with photographs may load slowly; site maps can be absent, hard-to-find, or out-of-date, and movement within the site is unstructured and frustrating.
- Practicality – sites presenting photograph products display landscape photographs in a romantic tradition; commercial sites highlight new varieties and cultivars, and travel sites emphasize luxurious and often ostentatious gardens.
Internet Sites that Offer Garden Landscape Photos
Here is a selection of Internet sites that offer garden landscape photographs. Cost, user-friendliness, and practicality are the basics used for review.
- Fee-, Membership-, or Subscription-Based Landscaping Photo Sites
Decorating Inspiration: 15,000+ photos; gardens and garden features, plus interior decorating ideas; site subscription for 3 months (90 days) is $24.95 and includes one-year subscriptions to Better Homes and Gardens® and Country Home® magazines (a $9.90 value).
Landscaping Ideas To Make Your Homes Beautiful: 4,287 landscaping pictures; membership is $37 for one full year; owners present the site as a private, paid, members-only website.
- Commercial, Photos for Purchase Sites
Derek Fell's Garden Photo Library: l50,000 images of plants, gardens and travel destinations; showcases photographic and written work of Derek Fell, garden photographer and writer; photos in the romantic tradition; search and browse at no cost; horizontal navigation bar, user-friendly.
- Commercial, Commodity-emphasis Sites
Proven Winners® ColorChoice® Flowering Shrubs: Excellent photos and descriptions of individual plants; some feature plants in landscape settings; some settings may look artificial; includes new plant list, plant care; gardening links and retail sources; horizontal and vertical naigations bars, user-friendly, graphic-heavy.
Amish Country Gazebos: Picture gallery; nine thumbnail photos of gazebos that can be enlarged; excellent presentation of a popular garden feature; gazebo designs - pool, pagoda and Victorian; links to a "scrapbook" section; vertical navigation bar, user-friendly, text-heavy.
- Free Plant Photograph Sites
HortNet Library: 4048 highly accurate images (February 5, 2007); request for donations in the left-hand navigation column; owned and maintained by Christopher Lindsey; majority of photos from Lindsey's own nursery stock, trips to arboreta and botanic gardens; great reference and resource site; slow-loading, and occasionally navigation is awkward.
HortiPlex Plant Database: Part of iVillage GardenWeb; photos of individual plants, some in landscape settings; hub of information about thousands of plants; contains images, data, and offsite links (commercial and noncommercial) to more information, images, and vendors. slow-loading, and navigation awkward at first because of information quantity.
Home Landscaping Pictures: Segment of David Beaulieu's landscaping topic at About.com; slow-loading because of abundance of text and photos; vertical navigation bar as well and secondary and tertiary links within the main topic.
- More Information
Residential Landscaping Pictures discusses how to make use of landscape design and landscape idea photos as landscape design tools.
The Encyclopedia of Garden Design and Structure , 2005, by Derek Fell, garden photographer and writer, contains garden inspiration and ideas from A to Z.
Landscape Design, Tips and Terms discusses how the core of Derek Fell's book "Encyclopedia of Garden Design and Structure" is an information bank of garden landscape photos, but the introduction is its foundation.
©Text and photograph by Georgene A. Bramlage, March 2007. Reproduction without permission prohibited.
