The front yard – often a missed opportunity in front of our homes: Although it takes up a significant portion of the yard land available to us, some front yards look like a desert with a few hints of green. With the right front yard design, the front yard can definitely become a living environment that can be used happily and well. Read some suggestions in this direction below.
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Front garden design “with sense” makes sense
In Germany, the classic front garden is primarily understood as a representative area that is intended to give every visitor a first impression of the type of people they will meet in their home. In any case, it should convey a picture of order and cleanliness. Frequently, the space available here should/must also accommodate the car parking space and a hidden location for the garbage cans. He should also look good.
Is there really room for design with this function-overloaded figurehead of the entire household? Yes, in any case! Because even the classic front garden is designed with plants. It is very good for this front garden design if you follow a uniform line or base it on a motto, which the shape is then based on. In this way, even a classic front yard becomes a very individual piece of living environment. Of course it doesn’t have to stay that way. You can also design your front yard in such a way that completely different purposes or functions come to the fore. Here are some ideas and examples for front garden design, from traditional to extraordinary.
Easy-care front yard in a traditional guise
If you would like to see “a completely normal” front yard in front of your house, it will look the best if you a) create harmony and b) ensure that this front yard is so easy to maintain that the harmony is spoiled as little as possible by unplanned and sprawling things growth is disrupted. You create harmony by dividing the entire area into balanced lines, which may well have a few curved shapes. This is preliminary work that should be done on paper on a plan.
The paths and parking areas are now laid out with an easy-care and natural-looking surface. It looks very harmonious if you choose a pavement that takes up a material that was also used in your house. Now the remaining area is covered with the appropriate plants. A hedge of slow-growing hedge plants forms structures. Lawns or mini perennials grow in the areas in between, which look good with or without flowers and require little maintenance. Towards the street, this front yard may “show off” a little. A hedge is planted here, which consists of many native hedge plants and is allowed to develop freely as a bird protection hedge. The advantage for you: no constant hedge trimming, but you can get by with a large pruning shears,
Example: In front of the simple concrete building, paths and parking spaces are covered with concrete paving in exactly the same color. Small box hedges border the bed areas in which heather, various sedums and purple bells grow. The hedge facing the street was put together by a specialist nursery from slow-growing bird protection plants. The highlight grows on the lawns. A fragrant herb-lawn-seed mixture was sown here, which slowly grows into a beautiful dark green and smells wonderful.
The front yard, “as if peeled from the egg”
This front yard is almost exclusively populated with evergreen plants that keep it alive all year round. If you want, you can of course include some beautiful tubs that match the facade in the ensemble. In summer you can fill them with flowering plants and in winter with small arrangements of fir green. Planting with native evergreens, which feel more at home with us than foreign exotic plants, is recommended here. Accordingly, they simply look better without excessive maintenance. A beautiful front yard for a townhouse where business visits are also expected.
For the materials for the path covering, you should use the building materials of the house again. If your facade combines several materials, you can very well use them all again in the front yard. That brings double benefits. The bed edgings, pavement ornaments or planters introduced here ensure that the whole ensemble looks very well-groomed without much work. They also help the house and front yard to merge into one.
Example: A hedge of evergreen, native trees, boxwood and firethorn, yew, mahonia and juniper runs around the front yard. Indoors, some of these shrubs appear in clusters, with smaller evergreens planted in front of them, such as various varieties of holly, contrasted expressively by bamboo from the hardy Fargesia genus. The areas of earth remaining between the paths are planted with simple, beautiful ivy, which also likes to form an evergreen and very decorative cover on the ground.
For the whole family
A front yard for the whole family also offers something for every member of the family: a pleasing basic structure for the parents, stimulation for the children and, best of all, something to harvest… It’s impossible to combine that? Yes, it can, if you combine the simplest possible structure with hard-wearing plants and some craftsmanship: trees and shrubs are planted outside that bear fruit, while the inside of the front garden is designed very simply, but imaginatively. The path to the house should lead fairly directly there, but preferably not in a straight line (you can also endure a slight curve if you are laden down with groceries) – with such a path design, you can well plan a few side paths that are otherwise robust with grass loosen up the planted area. Sandboxes are placed in the bends of these paths,
Example: The paths are covered with wood chips or rubber granulate mats, a non-hazardous surface even for small children. The sandboxes represent the outlines of various animals, or, for children who are not going to dig for too long, the outlines of various flowers. Because you could later fill such sandboxes with nutritious soil and plant them, or let the children plant them, so they can then immediately gain their first gardening experiences on their “own beds”. Fruit bushes are planted around the front garden, of which you can choose from around a dozen. The most beautiful “children’s bushes” are definitely raspberries and red currants, maybe gooseberries and hazelnuts.
Blooming wonders all year round
This front yard will delight you with blooms all year round. In winter, some winter bloomers will even poke their heads through the snow if need be. In early spring, a whole series of shrubs will gradually show their flowers. More will follow in early summer, and from summer to autumn a wide variety of flowering perennials will compete for your attention. Such a lively front yard can otherwise have a rather sparse basic structure. It should ideally look very natural. Large, simple natural stone slabs could form the path, supplemented by simple planters made of natural stone, which show off “your” blossom wonders in all possible places in the front yard. Anything that is not planted with flowering shrubs or perennials and is not a path is simply covered with grass.
Example: winter bloomers are e.g. B. Christmas roses and snowdrops, hellebore and winter jasmine as well as osmanthus and witch hazel . They are followed by crocus and daphne and violets, field maple and alyssum and barberry , lily of the valley and service pear. So it goes on, with summer blooms of hollyhocks, marigolds and bluebells, cornflowers and heather. Until winter returns with thistles and autumn crocuses. Of course, a lot of planning is required for the flowers to really alternate throughout the front yard. The “trick” with the plant pots will help you here. If you find that certain flowers would look better elsewhere, you can simply place these planters there.
The front yard that brings bountiful harvest
You can also turn your front yard into a sort of “natural grab bag” where you can harvest lots of beautiful things. So that such a front yard really looks like a front yard, you just have to rethink. You don’t create proper herb beds, but distribute the usable plants just as decoratively in your front yard as you would do with any ornamental plant. This is more than unusual, but by no means forbidden.
Example: You plan your front yard the way you want it to be divided. For example, with a hedge around it, some larger plants that are spread over the area and a curved path from the door to the house. This also includes small areas that are to be green like a lawn. In this planning you now add the plants from which you can harvest something. The hedge consists of service pear, hazelnut and elder. Before that there are black currant, sea buckthorn and sloe. A blackberry climbs up a decorative rose arch. The summer-flowering perennials here are chamomile, lavender and lemon balm, as well as mint and rosemary, marigold and sage. In the case of the “delicious front garden for advanced users”, the wall of the house is equipped with a trellis. An espaliered apple or peach or a grapevine climbs up here. The areas otherwise covered with lawn are covered with fragrant ground cover plants such as thyme, camomile, woodruff and calamus, which can also be walked on.
The representative front yard
If the Harvest Front Yard gives you chills as a stressed-out city dweller, perhaps the calming “Almost Zen” Front Yard is for you. This front garden is designed like a small park with clear areas and a strictly geometric layout. It gets paths covered with white gravel or sand and is bordered with a very straight cut hedge. Not much happens inside, but what little is arranged very carefully and considered, whether it is thick tuffs of grass or puristic tubs with rose bushes in them or individual cherry laurel bushes.
Example: Here the geometric layout plays the most important role. Depending on the layout of the front yard, you can choose different but always clear areas. Restraint is also the order of the day when it comes to the choice of plants, and the overall color expression in this front yard is limited to green with bright accents, a combination of different shades of green or green that is as uniform as possible, loosened up by a few stronger colours. Such a color could e.g. B. can be contributed by a small pond, either as a strictly formal pond basin with bright blue water (bright blue walls) or as a planted pool in which all the green tones of this world shimmer. There might even be room for a small seating area…
preparations
As you have just seen, a front yard can meet a wide variety of needs, and you don’t necessarily have to have one of those needs clearly in the foreground. You should therefore go through the following questions beforehand (with paper and pen), which usually bring a little more clarity:
- Are you willing to invest some maintenance in your front yard, when you plant it and afterwards?
- Or should the front yard ideally “grow along” all by itself?
- How representative should (must) the front yard appear?
- Would you like to use your front yard extensively, for relaxation or nutrition?
- Or do you really want to be able to garden in your front yard?
Of course, further or completely different needs may arise during the considerations. If you have arranged all these purposes of a front yard according to their importance for you and your family, you will know much better where the front yard design should go.
Conclusion
A front yard does not necessarily have to remain the “green spot in front of the front door”, but can become a piece of consciously designed nature that you can really use. How much effort you put into it is entirely up to you. Even an almost self-governing front garden can offer you inspiration or relaxation.
