This aesthetic screenshot of an old windows app has been in my inspiration space for ~5 years. Until recently, I assumed that it was just a nostalgia bait concept.

The calm, serene life associated with gardening pairs suspiciously well with rose-tinted wistfulness for a simpler time in computing. I’m happy to be wrong though, because software doesn’t get more real than PlantStudio.

Written by Kurtz-Fernhout Software, PlantStudio is a surprisingly deep botany simulator for creating and arranging 3D models of herbaceous plants based on how real plants grow, change, fruit, and flower, over their life cycles.

How to Install

Because the last release of the app was in 2002, and it was for Windows 95/98/2000/NT4, we’ve got a little bit of work to do to get it running on macOS:

1. Download PlantStudio210.zip and unzip it
2. Download Whisky to run windows code in a container called a bottle
3. In Whisky, click + button to create a new bottle (I set it to Windows 10)
4. Click Open C: Drive and copy the PlantStudio210 folder into Program Files
5. Click Run and open Program Files/PlantStudio210/PlantStudio.exe

PlantStudio lives again 🌱🌺

Let’s Grow Some 3D Plants

After you read or skip the tutorial docs, you’re be greeted with an empty window, which is kind of like the ‘garden’ that your plants will live in. One way to jump in is to File → Open some sample files.

The interface is full of unlabelled and unfamiliar icons, but the hover tooltips in PlantStudio are the most verbose I’ve ever seen – which helps a lot.

To fill the garden with our own herbs, shrubs, and flowers, use Plant → Create New… which opens the thorough 10-step Plant Wizard, and teaches us some biology terms along the way.

Each option button has a detailed little illustration that makes the impacts of technical concepts, like ‘inflorescence’, easy to understand.

I also love the wizard progress icons in the footer. Because the colors match the button illustrations, it’s easy to jump from editing stems and leaves (green icons), to editing flower related options (purple icons). The start and stop traffic lights for the intro and confirmation steps serve as cute bookends.

Designers can use color to conceptually link related interfaces together. I did this when I redesigned Futureland a couple years ago.

One thing I kept wishing for while creating plants was the ability to see a live preview while I was selecting options. Maybe they didn’t think of that, or maybe the performance impacts would’ve been too much for the minimum required 100MHz CPU of the day.

Cultivating a Garden

As you create plants, they’ll appear in the garden area, where you can arrange them by scaling, rotating, editing, posing, and even changing their age.

It took awhile, but by repeatedly creating plants in the wizard and arranging each one, even I could make something pleasant enough:

I could’ve probably saved some time by selecting one or multiple plants to Plant → Breed to create offspring. The Breeder lets you define how similar the children are from their parents, and adjust the amount of mutation (random chance changes).

Export Options

You can be creative with your plants models by exporting jpg, 3ds, or obj files into other art apps. The official Gallery has a couple y2k-era masterpieces that were composed with whimsical 3D tools like Bryce, and then polished in 2D art tools like Paintshop Pro and Photoshop.

The process for making these images is strikingly similar to what landscape architects do today. Much like how software designers use mockups, architects use 3D renderings to convince clients, to market their work, and as a starting point for working with contractors.

Also, plants look really cool inside Kinopio spaces. Maybe I’ll figure out some kind of ‘integration’ in the future…

So Why Am I Only Finding Out About Plantstudio Now?

The husband and wife duo Paul Fernhout and Cynthia Kurtz were the authors behind Kurtz-Fernhout Software. Unsurprisingly, both have degrees in Biology and Ecology.

Their original goal was to build a gardening simulator to “help people understand how to garden in a more sustainable way in their own backyards”. The simulation was based the EPIC (Erosion/Productivity Impact Calculator) agricultural model by the USDA Agricultural Research Service.

We worked as a team on most design phases of the project. Paul did most of the low-level coding, the general architecture, the undo/redo system, the file system, the graphical display, and the 3D turtle engine. Cynthia did most of the translation of the EPIC model, the flowering/fruiting submodel, the plant drawing algorithm, the various window designs, and the artwork, music, and documentation.

PlantStudio was originally built to draw plants for the gardening simulator, but they “found that everyone tended to like the plant designer so much they wanted to play with it instead of with the garden simulator”, so released it separately.

Not entirely dissimilar to the story behind SimCity,

While developing his first commercial game […], Will Wright noticed that designing city maps for the player to fly over in a helicopter was more fun than actually [playing the game]. He began expanding his world-building tools as an experiment. He applied various urban planning and computer modelling theories, implementing whatever ideas he’d been reading.

Unfortunately, PlantStudio was discontinued in 2002,

What happened to our old software and the plans for it? We spent years working for other people to pay off money (with interest) we borrowed to finish it and free it.

I empathize with their story because the world is rarely kind to organic niche creative consumer software. I’m sure the market at the time was a lot more developer friendly overall, but businesses need to always be reaching new people to sell more licenses.

In an alternate universe, maybe PlantStudio could have survived by evolving into a game in the vein of SimCity and SimEarth, e.g. ‘SimGarden’.

Incidental Beauty

There’s something appealing about objects and interfaces built for purpose, like race cars and professional-use espresso machines. In cases like these, beauty feels like a byproduct of an object built to do it’s job well – and there’s something appealingly genuine about that.

I’d describe PlantStudio the same way. It doesn’t look or work like a modern app, but anyone can figure it out because it’s interface elements are delightfully chunky, unfussy, and well documented by illustrations, inline text, and tooltips.

It’s definetely not for everyone, but the best things rarely are. Creating those gardens gave me a new perspective – and some new ideas – for my own design work.

It took a while, but I’m glad I found PlantStudio.

Special thanks to Ethan from Plantkind for giving me a bit of insight into his landscape architecture practice for this post.