Canva cons: What's Wrong with Using Canva for Garden Design?
When you search for Canva, a free graphic design tool popular for social media and simple layouts. Also known as a drag-and-drop design app, it lets anyone throw together a pretty picture in minutes. But if you’re trying to plan a real garden, Canva’s simplicity becomes a problem. It’s not built for measuring space, understanding plant growth, or accounting for soil type, sun angles, or drainage. You can drag a fake palm tree onto a flat background, but that doesn’t mean it’ll survive your Brighton garden. Canva treats gardens like posters — clean, static, and decorative. Real landscaping is messy, dynamic, and deeply tied to local conditions.
That’s why many gardeners hit walls using Canva. You can’t simulate how a mature shrub will block your window in three years. You can’t test if your path width works for a wheelbarrow. You can’t even see how your chosen grass will look under winter frost or summer heat. Tools like PRO Landscape Home or even free apps like Garden Planner are built around actual horticulture data — they factor in hardiness zones, root spread, and seasonal color changes. Canva doesn’t. It gives you pretty colors, not practical results. And if you’re spending hours arranging fake flowers on a blank canvas only to realize your design won’t fit your actual plot, you’ve wasted time better spent on soil prep or choosing the right artificial grass for your space.
Even worse, Canva encourages bad habits. People start thinking a perfect-looking layout equals a working garden. But a garden isn’t a Pinterest board. It needs structure, function, and resilience. A landscaper uses scale, elevation, and plant behavior — not just aesthetics. Canva doesn’t teach you those things. It just lets you copy what others have made. If you’re serious about your outdoor space, you need more than visuals. You need insight. That’s why the posts below dig into real garden problems: why overwatering kills plants, how to fix hard soil, what happens when you put too much sand on artificial grass, and which plants actually thrive in unheated greenhouses. These aren’t design tricks. They’re solutions built on experience, not filters. What you’ll find here isn’t about making your garden look good on Instagram. It’s about making it work — for years, not just for photos.