Front Garden Design

Despite being the first thing you see as you approach your home, the front garden normally comes a poor second to the time, effort and money that gets poured into the back garden.

Admittedly, the back garden is usually the place used for outdoor recreation, entertaining and children’s play area and therefore gets a lot of use, but the front garden paints a picture about the people living inside, it reflects the owners sense of style and provides either a welcoming environment to visitors or an off-putting one depending on the front garden design that’s there.

Most houses usually have a small garden at the front, a bigger one at the back and have a small connecting piece along the side. Often, the local landscape dictates a lot of the layout of the gardens, both front and back; but throw in a driveway and/or garage at the front, and the options for a free hand when it comes to front garden design are often quite limited.

When it comes to good design, there are six main principles that it’s useful to address. This includes ideas for small gardens-the category that usually covers front gardens. These principles are scale, emphasis, balance, simplicity, uniformity and variety.

Uniformity and variety often make the biggest impact.

When you’re deciding on your front garden design, apart from how you’d like it to look; it’s important to work out how much time and effort you’re prepared to put into maintaining it. An overgrown and unloved intricate front garden looks far worse than a neatly mowed square of grass!

It really doesn’t matter if you decide that your front garden design should have no more that coloured gravel and garden pots; you can still have a completely non green fingered garden and make it look good.

Unless you already have some firm ideas for your front garden design, it’s quite usefully to take your inspiration from nature and the climate in which you live. Have a look up and down the street and see what other people are doing in their front gardens.

For example; if you live in a hot, dry and arid location; lots of lush greenery is going to be very hard, if not impossible to maintain. Whereas an arrangement of rocks, boulders, crushed glass and cactii could look stunning.

You certainly don’t need to copy other people’s front garden designs, but there will be different bits from different front gardens that can be adapted to your own way of doing things.

Just like with any plan, your front garden design needs putting down on paper. Sketch it out, to a fairly accurate scale and make sure it’s going to fit. Your concrete driveway cannot be moved over a bit!

Think about things like where will the rainwater run off, which way does the sun go past, what about the rubbish bins and the kids coming back with their bikes?

You might also want to consider the neighbours for a second. You might be very excited at the thought of a huge naked Greek god as the focal point of your front garden design, but the neighbours might not want to look at him over their morning papers!

Due to most houses having these small areas around the house that all join up to make the garden area, it always looks better if there is some kind of continuity to the design.

That’s not to say they should all be the same, though, if that’s what you want, that’s your privilege. This is where the uniformity and variation that were mentioned earlier come into play. Often, the front and back gardens are completely separate, so it is possible to have them completely different, but generally it’s best to follow some kind of pattern. This is the uniformity part of the challenge.

The variety is just as easy. If you decide that you want tropical garden plants, and your climate will allow that, you could perhaps have clusters of garden pots with tropical garden plants of similar colours, or leaf sizes or shapes, grouped together. Further round the back, you could use the same kind of garden pots and perhaps use them to house your own back yard bog garden, or herb garden.

The phrase to remember is variation on a theme. Pick a colour, or plant variety, or plant size for example and don’t be afraid to wander off the line for a bit and pick something like it but not the same. Just remember to come back to the original line!

What you want to try to avoid in your front garden design is a gravel garden on one side of the drive and vegetables on the right. That’s not to say you couldn’t make those two fit, but they need linking to look their best. For example, if you had your gravel arrangement surrounded by a little clipped box hedge, and had the same clipped box hedge border for your vegetables; that would be your uniformity factor.

So, when it comes to front garden design, first and foremost, it’s your garden, so don’t let anyone tell you how to do it, unless you asked them to! Secondly, try to imagine what you would think of your ideas if they were outside someone else’s house. Would it be nice or naff?