Gardening Your Front Yard

Projects and Ideas for Big and Small Spaces - Includes Vegetable Gardening, Pollinator Plants, Rain Gardens, and More!

Tara Nolan

• Publisher: Cool Springs Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780760364871
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Horticulture
• Index: Biological Sciences

Gardening Your Front Yard is an active, inspiring resource that shows you how to treat your front yard like a backyard without sacrificing beauty, from choosing the right plants to building front patios and walkways. With her unique combination of DIY/building savvy and gardening expertise, author Tara Nolan ( Raised Bed Revolution ) weaves you past the main pitfalls you may encounter when trying to fit a garden or gardens between your home and the street. This beautiful and comprehensive book shows how to accomplish several hardscape projects, such as building front patios, borders, edging, and walkways, as well asmaking your own raised beds, planting containers, trellises, rose arbors, privacy screens, and more—all custom-designed for the rigors of front-yard gardening. Gardening Your Front Yard is a garden book in every sense of the word, however. Choosing the right plants is even more important when you are dealing with a small, highly visible area with less than ideal growing conditions—all common traits of most front yards. You will find advice on training vines up brickwork and planting around foundation walls, planting boulevards/hell strips, and you'll even take a trip into the side yard. Shade gardens, privacy screening, and security dos and don'ts are covered, plus how to intermingle edibles and landscape plants, cactus and succulent gardens, birdbaths, and much, much more. With thesage advice and step-by-step projects of this comprehensive guide, convert your front yard from a bland grasscape to a vital living space.

CHAPTER 1

THE FRONT YARD COMES INTO FOCUS

“Don’t pick that dandelion!” my 7-year-old niece chided me one spring day as we were walking up my driveway. “That’s the first source of nectar for bees in the springtime,” she added—authoritatively. I love that someone had taught her that factoid—and that it stuck.

There was a time when the sight of a few dandelions would have drawn scorn from neighbors (I’m sure it still does, for some) who worried the seeds would float onto their own perfect lawns. But we have come a long way these last few years, as more and more homeowners see the value of putting their front yard gardens to better use. We have moved away from plain green lawns sprayed to eradicate any sign of other life—like dandelions—not to mention beneficial insects, which are innocent bystanders.

Walk down many urban or suburban streets these days and, chances are, you’ll see at least a small mix of homes that have gone the front yard garden route—with food, flowers, or a mix of both—peppered among the traditional green lawns—both weed filled and weed free.

Many recent gardening articles have encouraged both seasoned and novice green thumbs to garden with mindfulness for the environment. Mainstream publications aren’t always that overt in their messaging, but it’s easy to read between the lines. All these gardening measures have a long-term goal of helping the Earth: Plant for pollinators. Plant to save the monarch butterfly. Plant to save the bees. Include drought-tolerant species to conserve water. Look for native plants at local nurseries. Capture rainwater in rain barrels to hydrate your plants. Eat local by supporting nearby small-scale farmers. Eat local by growing your own vegetables. And, to circle back to the humble dandelion, you don’t have to pull all the weeds because not all weeds are bad.

These are just a few of the directives that have crept out of traditional gardening publications and into mainstream reading. Turf grass starts to look relatively useless when you apply all these ideas to your own yard and make a plan to do things such as grow food, support wildlife, and capture rainwater responsibly.

Coincidentally, while researching for this book, a few timely headlines popped up and confirmed the zeitgeist of this front yard shift. Within a 3-week period, the New York Times alone featured three lawn-averse articles: “I’m Done Mowing my Lawn: A Manicured Swath of Grass May be the Ultimate Symbol of Suburbia, but Perhaps it Shouldn’t Be”; “One Thing You Can Do: Reduce Your Lawn”; and “To Nurture Nature, Neglect Your Lawn: Why Poison the Earth When You Can Have Wildflowers at Your Feet and Songbirds in Your Trees Without Even Trying?” Around the same time, Grist, an online nonprofit environmental magazine, didn’t beat around the bush: “Lawns are the number 1 irrigated ‘crop’ in America. They need to die.” Um, point taken! And don’t even get me started on synthetic grass.

Credit: Donna Griffith

Gardening the front yard is not a fringe concept adopted by a few forward-thinking folks. I feel as though we’ll be seeing more and more innovation when it comes to front yard design and planting. And, if you think you’ll miss the feeling of cool green grass between your toes on a hot summer day, look for alternative, sustainable grass varieties that require less water and maintenance.

Now is an exciting time for front yard gardens. There are just so many possibilities with purposes beyond pleasing your neighbors or potential homebuyers. In fact, the idea for this book was germinated over a discussion about how front yards are, once again, becoming social spaces. This discussion blossomed into a broader conversation about all the other modern concepts suddenly being applied to front yards, including veggies, water- and drought-driven plant choices, and cut flowers.

In my book Raised Bed Revolution, I was able to fit all the broader ideas together, like the pieces of a puzzle. Raised beds for big spaces? Check. Raised beds for small spaces? Check. Upcycling ideas, season extenders, and trellising options? Check, check, check. But with Gardening Your Front Yard, every time I crossed off a concept to include from my list, I found a new idea. I feel like the inspiration I’ve gathered is an unlimited mood board or scrapbook of ideas that can forever be expanded upon.

THE EVOLUTION OF CURB APPEAL

The basic goal behind curb appeal is to make your home and front yard attractive from the street—especially for potential homebuyers. It’s about first impressions. Setting aside the house itself, a universally accepted aesthetic of what constitutes a desirable front yard evolved and then stayed put, frozen in time: a tidy lawn, with perhaps a tree or two, and well-manicured gardens with a mix of familiar shrubs, annuals, and perennials.

However, after being inspired to turn the front yard of my first home into a garden, I realized that curb appeal is a very individual response, much like our clothing choices or interior design. Although I thought what I’d done looked pretty good for an amateur and neighbors had commented on how much they liked it, I’m sure others grumbled to themselves about how awful it looked or worried that it was bringing down the neighborhood property values.

Since my first little foray into front yard gardening, I’m seeing more and more front yard garde...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• 1. The Front Yard Comes into Focus
• 2. Front Yard Living: A Return to Being Social in the Front Yard
• 3. Front Yard Flowers, Foliage, and Groundcover
• 4. Growing Vegetables in Front Yards
• 5. Eco-Friendly Front Yards
• 6. Front Yard Garden Embellishments
• Resources and Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Meet Tara Nolan
• Index
• Dedication
• Copyright