Laying out and designing the front yard

A front garden should therefore meet different needs, maybe even quite a few different needs. It is therefore certainly not bad if you formulate these needs beforehand and try to rank them. Before planning, you should therefore answer the following questions with “yes”, “no” or “possibly”, perhaps with a cross next to it for the importance: Priority

• Should the front yard appear representative?
• Do you prefer a more classic planting or a more unusual one?
• Do you want your plants to be easily obtained from normal retailers?
• Or would you like to take the time to contact specialist nurseries (e.g. with naturally grown, original plants)?
• Do you have a great need for order or can the front yard grow a little “freely”?
• Can your front garden do work after the installation is complete?
• Or should it be so easy to care for that once it has been designed, there is hardly anything left to do?
• Would you like to use your front yard?
• benefits for relaxation,
• Or to stay for a barbecue, if possible with friends?
• Or do you want to settle many beautiful plants in your front yard, in other words:
• Should and must the front yard replace the garden?
• Should these plants just be beautiful, ideally all year round?
• Or would you prefer to harvest, fruit and vegetables and (medicinal) herbs?

You can then look at the following (and tons of other) front yard design suggestions and check how many points on your list each design suggestion meets and to what extent. Here are some suggestions for the front yard design.

A front yard that hardly does any work

The front garden, which requires almost no care once the system is complete, is only equipped with easy-care plants. Overall, it is divided into clear areas. Limiting the variety of plants also plays a key role in ensuring that such a low-maintenance front yard looks elegant and calming, but not boring. Cobblestones, which divide the area into a path and a planting area, provide a basic optical structure. Beautiful accents can be set with colored decorative ceramic paving stones.

The beds are now covered with a well thought-out selection from the rich area of ​​easy-care plants: ivy, which climbs up the house wall or a climbing frame or overgrows the ground, easy-care hedge plants such as thuja, cherry laurel or yew delimit the planted areas. In between, z. B. roses or flowering perennials for color spots. This front yard is green in summer and winter, and all you need to take care of it is a pair of pruning shears and a rake.

A classic but low-maintenance front yard

The classically laid out front yard impresses with its orderly lines, which should not be without a few curved shapes. Internal structuring with hedge plants ensures that this front yard exudes calm. Lawns can be laid out within the structures created in this way. However, you can also provide a small area for flowering plants, e.g. For example, if you combine purple bells and weigela with heather and stonecrop, you will have colorful flowers in the garden for a large part of the year and still not much work with care.

So that this front garden gets a little momentum while taking care of easy maintenance, the border to the street is planted with as much variety as possible. Here you could e.g. B. Use Kolkwitzias, whose numerous umbelliferous flowers hang decoratively, hornbeams, which add nice fresh green, and maybe a field maple and an elder. You already have a lot of variety around the front yard (and created a small bird protection hedge).

The front yard for show-offs

The front yard for show-offs, but also for all people who like peace and clarity, and for all people who design a front yard that they don’t just use alone, looks extremely representative: like a small park, and this effect is mainly due to a strictly geometric arrangement. Think about what to include beforehand. Lawns and roses, hedge plants and standard trees are e.g. B. a possible combination.

Then you start drawing: the lawn with the hedges around it, in any geometric shape, as a trapezoid or as a wave or as a mini maze with lawn in between. In between, the roses and the standard trees are placed as focal points. Then the whole thing is checked to see whether maintenance is possible. They should be attached to the lawn, e.g. B. come up with a lawn mower. Now the plants can be selected: With all the plants used, you should make sure that they are easy to cut. For the hedges are z. B. very good boxwood and as an impressive decorative standard cherry laurel. Because only if you prune all the plants in this front garden regularly and accurately can it show off its formal beauty to the full.

The Blossom Garden

With this front garden design you can get by without a lawn. Evergreen shrubs, perennials and climbing plants contribute to the green that is so readily perceived by the eye. If the front garden is very small and should still appear as richly planted as possible, ensure as much variety as possible in the colors in the green area: dark green box and dark olive-green spruce are complemented by lush green cherry laurel and light green bamboo (careful, choose a variety without rhizome formation !). This basic equipment makes the front garden look diverse and attractive even in winter.

Over the summer season, a sea of ​​flowers unfolds in this front yard. The gravel-covered paths complete the romantic, informal impression. Which flowering plants you bring in here depends on how much time you want to invest. The flowering perennials are usually the easiest to care for.

This front yard brings a rich harvest

For the front yard to be harvested, the basic structure idea can be gleaned from almost any of the other suggestions listed here. Only the “small park” is perhaps not quite as suitable, because plants that are to be harvested do not want to be constantly pruned, but need a chance to develop their harvest.

Otherwise, it is simply a matter of choosing the plants. As many plants as possible are gathered in this front yard, the products of which can be used in some way. For example, the hedge could B. consist of a willow, the sections of which are used for handicrafts and for weaving small vessels, plus fruit-bearing fruit bushes. A trellis apple or a trellis peach may grow on the wall of the house, but at least a grapevine. Perennials grow on the areas away from the paths, which bloom and can be used as tea plants or medicinal herbs against everyday ailments, such as yarrow and chamomile, calendula and lemon balm. They are complemented by many decorative herbs such as lavender, rosemary, sage and mint, which actually end up in the kitchen.

If you get rid of the idea that vegetable beds have to be rectangular, you can also grow edible vegetables in your freely designed front garden arrangement. They are simply spread over the beds like flowers. B. ornamental cabbage, which shows all possible colors inside like a huge flower (you can still eat it). A Brussels sprouts in the middle of the bed is just as decorative as it is delicious. If the garbage cans are in the front yard, there is a trellis around them, on which pumpkins or cucumbers are climbing.

If you now say: “But the fruit bushes are then harvested by passers-by on the outside!” That could well be correct. But without fruit bushes you wouldn’t even be able to harvest the inner side, so what the heck. There can also be satisfaction in being able to give young children the experience of being able to snack on a bush on their way to school.

The year-round front yard

The front yard, which looks good all year round, is home to mostly evergreens and definitely a lawned area and paved pathways. The evergreen plants give the front garden a green basic structure all year round. If you don’t feel like a lot of front garden care, just add a few flowering shrubs as focal points and otherwise leave it with the evergreen planted front garden. Again, you should first consider how you divide up the space. With this year-round front garden, you basically have the choice of whether you want the evergreen basic structure to be designed more formally, or whether you already give room for a lot of free growth here.

The selection of the evergreen plants should then be done with consideration, native evergreens are not available in large quantities. However, you should definitely make good use of these. Because with the evergreen exotics from foreign countries, it often has to do with the “easy to care for”. On the contrary, they are often pronounced children of the sun. In addition, the exotic species often drive our insects and birds to despair – and if you now think: “But that’s great if I can have some peace and quiet in the front yard,” that’s not entirely true. Because we perceive the insect life around us as annoying not only in a head-controlled manner, but also instinctively. This means that a garden in which there are no flies or flaps seems dead to us and therefore uncomfortable.

The lush year-round front yard, which actually replaces a garden, is completed with an assortment of flowering plants. This composition can be selected so that just any plant blooms in this front yard at any time of the year. Which plants you place depends first on whether you decide on a more formal or more free design. The strict geometry goes well with e.g. Cultivated roses are good, for example, while large, magnificent perennials such as wild asters or torch lilies are suitable for outdoor gardens.