Landscape professionals who use DynaSCAPE software to prepare their drawings and quotes will soon be able to add “Powered by Horticopia” plant photographs to their designs, thanks to a new agreement between DynaSCAPE and Horticopia. The partnership, which brings together the complementary strengths of two leaders in software for the green industry, will incorporate Horticopia’s collection of more than 9,000 plant pictures and information into DynaSCAPE’s CAD-based drawing and quoting software.
“We’re very excited to be teaming up with the leading experts in horticultural information,” says DynaSCAPE product manager Len Hordyk. “Our users will now have seamless access, from right within their design software, to an online DynaSCAPE database containing Horticopia’s huge store of plant photos and information.”
The arrangement is a bold move by DynaSCAPE, who is essentially upgrading their own previous plant encyclopedia with Horticopia’s richer store of plant photographs and data.
“We did initially create our own plant index, which has served us well for years” Hordyk says, “but in truth, we’re a landscaping software company, not an encyclopedia. So we lack the resources to keep our own plant photo collection up to date. Horticopia, on the other hand, has a number of horticulturists on staff, and that's their main focus. They’re the experts. It made a lot more sense for us to team up with the experts and showcase their material instead of our own.”
In addition to its greater number of photographs, Horticopia also brings a much wider range of plants to the DynaSCAPE database. The Horticopia collection includes photographs and data for plants from all of the USDA Plant Hardiness Zones, making the DynaSCAPE Design program much more attractive and useful to landscapers in all regions throughout North America. The new database will also include information on Sunset Zones for the benefit of landscapers in West Coast regions.
For its part, Horticopia will benefit from DynaSCAPE’s extensive reach and popularity within the landscape design industry.
“DynaSCAPE has a very good reputation,” says Anne Muecke, co-founder of Horticopia. “We’re thrilled about the partnership because it puts Horticopia’s plant information into the hands of more landscape professionals. I’ve always thought that it would be a good idea to make it easier for landscape design software to communicate with our software. DynaSCAPE is the very first company to want to build a true interface that lets its users access our photos and data directly from within their program.”
The partnership also makes DynaSCAPE a reseller of the Horticopia Professional plant reference that gives users additional capabilities to customize, organize and extend their plant collections.
“Horticopia Professional is the perfect extension for DynaSCAPE users who decide that they’ll need more photos or horticultural information than they can access through DynaSCAPE’s online database,” Muecke says.
