The gardens

I created a plane and used the sub object material editor to apply different materials to various sections i.e. grass, soil and a path. The individual flowers were then merged into the scene. Each flower was then duplicated using the array tool. This proved to be extremely time consuming and often too much the computer to cope with as 3D Max kept crashing. I added some omni lights to the scene and a camera. I originally placed the camera on a path constraint to go around the flower bed but the camera was either too close or too far from the flowers. I added an image (previously edited in photoshop to include the path) onto a background plane and adjusted the grass material on the ground plane accordingly. However this method of trying to blend in the ground plane with the background did not work as well as I hoped.

screenshot of garden scene

render of garden scene

render of garden scene