How to grow a front yard garden
Our front yards are growing — in our minds, at least — with next week’s arrival of March and the approach of spring.
Yours might be where passersby stop to admire a blooming rose. It’s where you lean on your shovel to chat with a neighbour.
Which brings us to a great new book by Dundas, Ont., gardening writer and editor Tara Nolan: “Gardening Your Front Yard: Projects and Ideas for Big & Small Spaces,” (Cool Springs Press, 2020).
Nolan’s book is bursting with ideas and inspiration. As she says in her opening chapter: “I feel like the inspiration I’ve gathered is an unlimited scrapbook of ideas that can forever be expanded upon.
“Let the brainstorming begin,” she adds.
“Gardening Your Front Yard” excels at taking the creative planning process, the brainstorming of randomly saved web pages, pictures, newspaper clippings or Instagram posts, and channelling them into thoughtful, cohesive designs and plans.
If you are coming up short on creative ideas for your own front yard, check out the rich illustrations and photos — many providing practical, how-to lessons on creating your front yard oasis.
During this past year of pandemic, we’ve had plenty of opportunities to observe our neighbours’ front yard efforts. Nolan also recommends leaving the well-known path to find inspiration in the wild. A walk through a Toronto area ravine, for example, provides clues for a flowering meadow garden. An online garden tour or visit to a public garden will make your brainstorming experience richer.
Nolan presents practical advice like a skilled knitter creating a pattern with different yarns.
Challenges, such as planting around your home’s foundation or eliminating lawn to make way for bigger gardens, are dealt with in detail.
In her chapter titled “Front Yard Living: A Return to Being Social in the Front Yard,” Nolan distinguishes the front yard experience from any other. For us, being social is the whole point of the front yard and the reason why we do not put an eight-foot fence around it.
The author makes the argument for a front-yard patio, which reverses the trend of the last few decades and puts the residents out front where we can be seen — and social. During the isolation of the pandemic, just waving hello to neighbours has a lot of appeal.
Making a place to sit and relax, that’s both visually appealing and comfortable, is uniquely challenging in the front yard where appearances are everything. The book includes plans for an attractive, live-edge bench and tips for remodelling your patio set.
Where flowers, foliage and groundcovers are concerned, Nolan knows and understands Canadian gardening. Her book is geared to what works in our growing zone.
Her section about lawns — and replacing lawns — is intriguing. Fescue grasses and clover mixes are reviewed in detail, as are meadows which are not a case of simply ignoring your front garden, but carefully planning, planting, and nurturing. Nolan delivers equal parts inspirational- and reality-gardening: she makes it clear there is no short cut to fulfilling your dream front yard.
And if you’d like other opinions, Nolan provides those, too. Perennial plant expert Tony Spencer from Mono, Ont., offers his knowledge of newperennialism — the ingenious method of landscape planning inspired by famed Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf. Sean James of Milton, Ont., is referenced for the creation of a groundcover-quilt. Paul Gellatly, from the Toronto Botanical Garden is introduced as a passionate front yard breeder of exotic lilies, and fatherdaughter food gardeners Steven and Emma Biggs are included for their innovative techniques to incorporate food gardening into the front yard.
Pretty much a garden party in a book, “Gardening Your Front Yard” delivers ideas and inspiration shared between passionate gardeners.
And right about now, a garden party sounds good to us!