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Computerized Mary Garden Design

Introduction

With the availability of popularly priced garden design and general
graphics software, Mary Gardeners can (1) create plans showing
flowering plant locations by miniature digitized color images scaled
and "pasted" to the plan - individually, or in clumps or sweeps -
and (2) add photos of focal garden statuary, making the plans
themselves virtual Mary Gardens.

Color print-outs of the sculpture and flowers of virtual Mary
Gardens serve to quicken the viewer to reflection and prayer, as do
the miniature illustrations of medieval books of hours.


The elements of computerized Mary Garden plant selection and garden
design are:

     1. A computer library of miniature flowering plant images and
        accompanying close-up bloom photos - with accompanying info
        as to height, bloom color, bloom period, growth type,
        climatic zones, planting time, and soil, temperature, light
        and moisture requirements for each plant, as a basis for
        selecting those desired for the garden.

     2. Creation or importation of garden site and bed layout
        images on the computer screen.

     3. Selection and placement on the computer screen layout of
        miniature plant images from the computer library, to produce
        virtual garden images of beds and plants.

     4. Selection and placement of minature Marian sculpture images,
        making plans virtual Mary Gardens.
        
     4. Final adjustment of statuary and plant locations for the
        integrity, proportion and clarity of the overall garden
        plan.

     5. Print-outs of

             - Virtual Mary Garden images showing over-all
               appearance.

             - Companion diagrams of Flowers of Our Lady placements
               in the garden bed(s) - by identifying number keyed to
               accompanying planting lists.

             - Summary listings of plants showing color, planting
               season and flowering season.


Our Procedure

For our own Mary Garden designs, we compose our layouts in
FLOWERscape; save them to disk; and then open them in ClarisWorks
and/or Painter for the addition of custom plot, plant, statuary and
landscape graphics.  We make our custom Painter floaters and
nozzles from digitized plant and statuary photos in our color slide
archives, scaled to size - making the backgrounds transparent using
the masking and selection utilities of Painter.

In accordance with computer convention, we adapt our Mary Garden
plans to a size which can be printed out on standard 8-1/2" x ll" or
11" x 17" printer paper (although landscape architects regularly use
larger hand-drafted drawings).  Since FLOWERscape at present only
provides for 5" high garden plans, it is necessary to make plans for
larger gardens in several segments - to be saved in separate files
for subsequently joining together using ClarisWorks, Photoshop or
Painter.

We are also examining commercially available landscaping software
for positioning completed garden layouts from FLOWERscape,
AppleWorks (ClarisWorks), Photoshop and Painter in a larger setting
of grass, shrubs, trees and buildings, etc.


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