What software to use for real land mapping?

[arimane]

Hello everyone,
I have done some small maps in the past, but only for RPG games, using GIMP and some Inkscape.
Now, I am a hobbyist gardener and I would like to map the ideas I have of what to do with a land or previous works, like what trees go where, where is a pond, this kind of stuff. Unlike in RPG maps, here I need to be precise with distances and sizes.

Quite a few people have recommended me QGIS over GIMP for it's more a standard in spatial measurement. It looks nice but before diving in the study I wanted an opinion of yours: is it worth to learn a new tool? What are the main advantages of QGIS over GIMP? I will gladly invest some learning hours if then I can have an easier life and more accurate maps, but it's really this the case?

Any other in put like plugins is also appreciated

Thanks for your help!

[Redrobes]

For a garden then theres no reason you cannot use Gimp. Just set the actual real world scale to pixels ratio like 1cm per pixel or whatever suits the size of garden your designing. I designed bits of my house using my own fantasy mapping app and it worked out fine and I would use it again for similar projects.

The main advantages of some GIS apps is that they could calculate areas or curvy lengths or a number of other things as a function within the app. With Gimp you would need to read off the line coords and convert them to real world all the time. But if you use some sensible pixel to metres scale then its no bother.

The advantage of Gimp over GIS / CAD tools is that you can easily get images of trees and some of the plants that you may want to use.