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Now that I have determined my host plants and nectar plants, it is time to create my butterfly garden plan for my backyard.

Although you could do this with pencil and paper, I decided to use a free tool from Google called Sketchup.  Sketchup is a 3D software tool allows you to create just about anything you can imagine...even a butterfly garden plan!

Since I decided to use Google Sketchup and Google provides a means to share your models with others, I created 3D models for all the plants used in My Butterfly Garden Plan and shared them for anyone to use (for FREE!) in Google's 3D Warehouse called Butterfly Garden Plan 3D Collection.

If you decide to use Google Sketchup, I would encourage you to spend a little time watching some of the online tutorials (especially the ones labeled 'New to Google Sketchup') as it will save you a lot of time in the end.  The tool itself is very easy and powerful to use - of course the price is right too!

One of the things I like most about using Google Sketchup is that you can create everything to scale (be sure to use the measuring tape tool!) and visualize how your design will work from many different angles.

Here is a YouTube video containing a number of 3D views to help me (and my wife) visualize what the butterfly garden plan will look like with mature plants from many different perspectives.  

Please feel free to share your comments and feedback!

Tools that I used:

• Google Sketchup
• GIMP (free tool that is very similar to Photoshop)
• Google Picasa (free tool from Google to create a video from the various .JPG image files I exported from Google Sketchup)

If you want more details on the process I went through to create the video above, please leave a comment!

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