From Swedish Greenhouses to 3D Worlds
A letter from the founder.
Founder story
Roots in the Soil
Some people discover gardens later in life. For me, they were always there.
My grandfather was a gardener by trade — as was his father before him, and his father before that. For generations, my family ran commercial greenhouses in Sweden, cultivating flowers and vegetables on a scale that turned soil and sunlight into a livelihood. Growing up around that world, I developed an appreciation for what a well-designed garden can do — not just for a landscape, but for the people who live in it.
Where Gardens and Software Meet
I chose software rather than horticulture, but gardens never disappeared from view. My work took me into CAD, 3D graphics and geodata: software for working with real places, measurements and three-dimensional spaces. The challenge was familiar — turning complex information into something people could see, understand and work with.
At a Swedish aerospace company, I managed software development for generating geodata used in aircraft navigation systems and flight simulators. Complex spatial information had to be accurate, understandable and useful.
Gardenly3D brings that software experience together with my family’s horticultural roots. I wanted a visual, garden-specific tool that keeps the project connected, from the first site observations to the material presented to a client.
The Gap in the Market
So when I finally sat down to design my own garden, I was struck by the state of the tools available. To me, the market felt split in two. On one side: expensive, heavyweight legacy CAD programs aimed at landscape architects rather than garden designers — many of them desktop-bound and showing their age. On the other: lighter web tools that, at least at the time, felt more like sketch pads than professional design software. I couldn't find what I'd come to expect from modern 3D applications: real-time photorealistic rendering, running in a web browser on modern laptops. So I decided to build it.
Gardenly3D Is Born
Gardenly3D is the tool I wish had existed — a cloud-based garden design platform built for professionals, with real-time photorealistic 3D rendering and no legacy baggage — designed from the ground up for the modern web. No downloads. No installs. Just open your browser and start designing. And because we built it from the ground up, it runs in major web browsers on modern laptops with nothing to maintain on your machine. While not every feature is live yet, our roadmap is full of planned work designed to make garden design feel more fluid and more intuitive. I like to think of Gardenly3D as the place where my two inheritances finally meet: generations of horticultural instinct, and decades of building software that turns complex technology into tools people actually enjoy using.
Gardenly3D brings together the two worlds that shaped me: horticulture and software.
— Magnus Unemyr, Founder