You’ve got your digital weather stations, and your gadgets that water plants while you’re off in St. Croix for three weeks.

But for the home gardener, the one technology growth area in recent years has been the increased sophistication of garden design software.

These programs, introduced more than a decade ago, use computer-aided design techniques developed for architects and engineers and later tweaked for garden planning. Using plant libraries and landscape drawing tools, you can “plant” and figure out what looks good where, before you begin to dig.

Recently, these programs have become rather thorny, packed with features that go way beyond a simple garden plot.

“One of the things the software companies try to do now is take the kitchen sink approach,” said Jim Sipes, a noted Atlanta-based landscape architect and expert on garden design software. “Sometimes it seems like they’re trying to offer too much.”

Without a great deal of research I chose a program by Punch Software called Master Landscape Pro Version 10.

The box advertising lured me in: 4,009 plant varieties included. Automatic growth tool. Topo designer. Global Sun positioning. Real-time fly-through.