**Warning: Make sure you watch the video in HD if possible, or better yet buy the app. The screenshots do not do it justice**

If there’s one thing this app achieves more so than polish and design, it’s the surprise and promise that a one man indie developer can come out with someting this spectacular.

Flower Garden ($2.99)

We’ve seen the iPhone transform into a Koi Pond or mess with little islanders in Pocket God, and of course, there are those infinitely great games in the likes of Eliss and Zen Bound. This time, Snappy Touch gives us our own little garden. Plant seeds, water them, watch them bloom, put them in a bouquet and send them to friends… Flower Garden does all of these. Prepare your eyes for this simulation game/toy that is sure to be one of the best show off apps for the iPhone. If the PS3 had Flower, ladies and gentlemen, the iPhone presents you Flower Garden.

Design

Two words: intuitive and polished. Flower Garden is set up to be understandable even without reading help pages or what not. Almost every button and function is what you’d expect them to be. The colors are crisp, animations are wonderful, and the sounds are ambient and relaxing. That’s an aweful lot of claims we put in front of ourselves so let’s get discussing them in detail.

Growing Flowers

When you start up the app, you get taken to your plant pots. As seen on the right screenshot, you’d have to take pretty darn good care of your plants to prevent them from dying.

Tapping on any empty pot takes you the seed selector:

The seed packets are designed just as you would see them at OSH or Home Depot. After selecting the flower you want to plant, you’re then taken to your garden with the selected pot up front:

You need to water the plants by pressing the water droplet button on the top right of the screen. Some flowers instantly grow. Some take hours, days or weeks to grow.  Make sure you maintain the lever within the green region. Otherwise, yellow gives the plant jaundice and red makes them die (in which case you need to water them again to revive them:

You can simply swipe around the center of the screen to move within pots left and right. Pots can be rotated 360. Camera view can be adjusted close to 90 degrees in case you want to look at the plant on eye level or sort of a skewed birds eye view. Here are a couple more flowers we’ve planted:

Picking Flowers and Sending Bouquets

Picking flowers is easy as pie. Simply select the flower you’d like to pick out and tap the scissor button (for reference, the two other buttons simply empty your pot):

After you’ve picked enough flowers, you can then access the bouquet from the Bouquet tab of course, in which case you can type a personalized message and send it to your special someone (or to us ;p):

The backgrounds are changeable and the flowers can be re-arranged by shaking your device. You can zoom in and out, rotate, change camera view on your bouquet to best suit your needs.

Ambient Sounds

Flower Garden is also an ambient sounds app in disguise. Check out the video below which shows some of the stuff we’ve discussed so far and of course, to see the animations in action (pay attention to Snappy Touch’s detail especially to the howling sound the app makes when you over-water your plant).

Where To Go From Here

We feel like this is one of our more extensive reviews (all of them are really, more so than other sites) and that should say something. It’s an outstanding achievement and deserves to be given such high praises and attention to detail.

We expect this app to slowly make it in the charts as it’s simply one of a kind and stunning and yet, there are still dozens of improvements that can be made:

• Tutorial Page. Even though everything’s intuitive, sticklers will cry about this.
• Make the bouquet labels more customizable. Change fonts, center, them, resize labels… etc.
• Add holiday/special occasions banner. Flower Garden is screaming for it during Valentines or Mothers Day.
• Add Sun button/counter water. Wouldn’t it be cool to utilize the other edge of the screen to provide sunlight to the flowers as well? Makes the app more in depth we think.
• Consider moving forward with an actual time management game where growing time doesn’t happen in real time (faster growth), add money/selling system.
• Crashing. Because of the animations the app handles, some users might experience eventual crashes. Snappy Touch is aware of this and is currently working on the update.

Conclusion

Buy the friggin’ app! You’ve read our review and watched the video. If you think it’s cool, well it is. Do yourself a favor and buy it! Snappy Touch is planning lots of exciting features including cross pollination over the internet. We’ve always wanted to create a rose with three heads so we save money during Valentines (;p).