Garden Visualization in Proposals: A Draft Is Not a Promise

Artificial intelligence has reached the broad economy: 57 percent of companies now use it (Bitkom). A year earlier the figure was 36 percent, two years earlier 20 percent (Bitkom). The numbers come from a telephone survey of 603 companies with 20 or more employees, conducted in calendar weeks 28 to 33 of 2026 (Bitkom). After customer contact, marketing and communication is the most common area of use, which the survey puts at 54 percent (Bitkom). That is exactly where images are made.

For a landscaping business, the 57 percent describe the trend, not its own yard. The sector counted 19,898 businesses in 2025 (BGL), and just over 73 percent of them had no more than five workers (BGL). The Bitkom survey only starts at 20 employees, so the typical landscaping firm does not appear in it at all. Official statistics come closer: according to the ICT survey, 26 percent of companies with ten or more employees used AI in 2025 (Destatis), and among small companies with 10 to 49 employees the share was 23 percent (Destatis). The two surveys ask different questions, at different times and of different groups. Side by side they only show that the direction is right and that use rises with company size.

What the tools are used for also appears in the official survey: 52 percent of companies that use AI generate pictures, videos or sound with it (Destatis). In landscaping, that mostly means design images. They come about in several ways: as a hand sketch in colored pencil, as a plan from CAD software with a 3D view, as a photo montage into a picture of the existing garden, or as an AI-assisted image generated from a description. To the customer, the last three often look the same, namely like a photo of a garden that does not exist yet. Which tool made an image is therefore secondary. What matters is what the image claims and where it is shown.

The most important place for this is the conversation with private customers. Private gardens were the sector's largest client segment in 2025, with 6.32 billion euros in turnover (BGL). Homeowners rarely read plans with contour lines and plant codes, but they understand pictures instantly. That is why a good visualization is so effective in sales: it makes the design tangible, helps with decisions on paths, seating and screening, and supports a paid design service as described in the article charging for garden design instead of free plans. The same effect is the risk: what the customer saw in the picture, they will later expect in the garden.

A visualization condenses. It shows a garden on a summer afternoon, without trash cans, with a freshly mown lawn and plants at their peak. That is not a flaw, it is the purpose of the image. It becomes difficult where the image shows a property that the contract settles differently. The overview separates what a design image typically depicts from what is binding elsewhere.

Fill in this table once for your own business and you have the text module for every proposal. The right-hand column shows the customer where to look things up and shows the site crew what has actually been ordered. It also prevents an employee from pointing at the picture in a sales conversation and promising more than the schedule of works provides.

The biggest gap between picture and garden opens up with the plants. A design image usually shows the state the garden is planned for: closed hedges, perennials at full height, trees with a developed crown. On handover day the same garden looks different. The hedge consists of individual plants with gaps between them, mulch shows between the perennials, the tree is a slim trunk with a small crown. That is technically correct and still a disappointment if nobody talked about it beforehand.

It helps to show growth explicitly instead of quietly anticipating it. There are three ways to do that: two images from the same angle, one with the planting size at handover and one after a few years; an image with the band “Plants shown after about three years”; or a plan in which the planting size is drawn as a small circle and the later crown as a dashed outline. Which period is realistic depends on species, site and care, and that can be said exactly like that in the conversation. The planting size itself goes into the planting list, for instance as height in centimeters or as trunk girth, so that it is not only in the picture.

The portfolio gallery has a different job from the proposal. The proposal shows what is to be created. The gallery shows what the business has already built, and with that, what it can do. Prospects draw conclusions from it about experience, trades, service area and quality. If a design image sits among photos of completed gardens, the gallery claims work that does not exist.

Under German unfair competition law, this is no side issue. A commercial practice is misleading, among other things, if it contains untrue information or information likely to deceive about essential characteristics of a service such as type, execution or quality (Section 5(2) no. 1 UWG) or about the trader's qualifications (Section 5(2) no. 3 UWG). The law states explicitly that an image can be such a statement:

A business acts unfairly if it engages in a misleading commercial practice that is likely to cause the customer to make a decision they would not otherwise have made (Section 5(1) UWG). A gallery meant to lead to an enquiry is built for exactly that. Omission can mislead as well: withholding essential information the customer needs for an informed decision is also unfair (Section 5a(1) UWG). In practice, this leads to a simple rule. Completed projects with your own photos, trade, location and year go into the gallery. Visualizations can appear on the website, but labeled and in a different place, for instance in the section on the planning process. The other rules for statements in advertising are summarized in the article advertising with prices and claims.

A gallery that takes this rule seriously does not need volume at the start, but it needs complete details for each project. How to build it with filters for trade, location and year is shown in the article building a portfolio gallery. For implementing it on your own website, there is the service portfolio gallery for landscaping businesses, in which every project is recorded with these details.

The images do not only come from the business. People who use generative AI often create images with it: 83 percent of users aged 16 and over have already done so (Bitkom, Studienbericht KI). So a self-made image showing how the garden should turn out may well be on the table at the first meeting. At first that is a gain. The customer has thought about it, and the image says more about style, colors and mood than any description.

At the same time, such an image often shows something that cannot be built that way: plants that will not thrive in partial shade, paving without falls, walls without a recognizable foundation, proportions that do not work on the property. It helps to accept the image as a mood reference and to say so. The business translates it into its own design that fits site, soil and budget, and writes into the proposal that the customer's image served as inspiration and is not the subject of the work. That keeps the customer's idea visible without turning an image that nobody could check into the yardstick.

For the website, this means the enquiry form can explicitly allow example images, as a separate field “Ideas and example images” next to the photos of the existing garden. Separate fields keep apart, right from the enquiry, what exists and what is wanted, and the business sees before the site visit where the customer wants to go.