• Home
  • Blog Posts
  • About Me

Front yard design using landscaper’s favorites

September 26, 2015 By Jim 5 Comments

Share on FacebookShare on TwitterSubscribe

Over the last few months, I have written about landscapers favorite plants. These have included posts about Trees, Shrubs, Hydrangeas, and some well known and some not so well known Perennials.

Back in January in my first post of the New Year, I also wrote about considering goals for your landscape that you may or may not have considered before in What do you really want?

Today, we will start a Front yard landscape design using landscaper’s favorites as well some to meet another goal.

To answer the question I ended my last post with, I will do this design for my…………………….old house.

 Front yard design using landscapers favorites, design badly needed
My front yard NEVER received the landscaping attention of my backyard

I lived there 15 years and never put much landscaping effort into my front yard. All my energy (and money) went into my private area (the backyard).

 Front yard design using landscapers favorites Jim's old backyard
The backyard received a bit more attention.

Sure I planted a Paperbark maple by the front door for winter interest as I left the house each morning and yes I did plant a few other shrubs and perennials.

That was about it though.

The Old Front Yard Finally Gets a Design!

In that first post of the year, I wrote about several possible goals for your landscape.

Today we consider just a few for this front yard landscape design. These include:

  • Providing a beautiful setting
  • Attracting wildlife like birds and butterflies
  • Increase your homes property value and curb appeal

Believe it or not, that is more then most people plan for. Most people omit the attracting wildlife from their FRONT YARD designs at least. This is a goal more commonly seen in backyards (such as my Backyard for Bird Watchers).

Besides including these goals, we also want to include a majority of our plants to be from our Landscaper’s favorites series of posts. These plants are generally easy care plants that are readily available.

So lets begin.

1st things 1st

The first thing we are going to do to that front yard is rip out that crappy sidewalk to the front door.

We will then double that driveway from one car to two cars.

We will do this because, as I can tell you from living there, one car driveways are a royal pain in the keaster!

 Front yard design using landscapers favorite's Base plan
That line in the back of the house is a fence and gate into the backyard.

WOW it’s so much better already, but I do suppose we need a walk to the front door. Lets ditch the straight line and get a nice curvy concrete paver walk.

Walk to the front Door is added

Concrete pavers are not nearly as expensive as flagstone or bluestone mostly because they are cheaper than those materials. They are designed to be dry laid as opposed to mortared onto a concrete base which also reduces their cost.

We will add a nice soldier course around the edge of the paver using a different paver color or style. This adds very little to the cost, but makes them look better then if they were all the same material.

 Front yard design using landscapers favorite's Walkway added
A concrete paver walk is added to our front yard.

Trees are added to our front yard design using landscaper’s favorites

We need to soften the corners our our house. To do this we will add a couple multi stem trees/larger shrubs to obscure the straight line from the roof to the ground and also to break up the straight line of the driveway addition.

So what trees or shrubs should we put there?

We want one that helps us to:

  • Provide a beautiful scene year around
  • Attracting wildlife like birds and butterflies
  • Block the view of the straight lines of the corner of our house and the driveway both now and as it matures.

If we look back at our post on landscapers favorite trees, we find a good candidate in the Autumn Brilliance Service Berry (Amelanchier × grandiflora ‘Autumn Brilliance’).

It looks great in four seasons, stays small enough to continue blocking the corner of the house, and attracts birds with its attractive and tasty berries.

 Front yard design using landscapers favorites Serviceberry flowers
This shrub sized serviceberry with it’s white spring flowers will slowly grow into small trees.
photo credit: CR1010 via photopin cc

Here is how it will look on our plan:

Front yard design using landscaper's favorites Serviceberry added
We add some service berry to break of the lines from our driveway and one of the corners of the house.

Structuring our Design by defining Bedlines

Now lets take the position of those trees and add some curvy beds to define where we want the rest of our plants.

Since this is a Front yard, I am less inclined to define the grass space the positive space (see my post on positive and negative space in the garden) but instead will comply with neighborhood norms and use the lawn as the default area I will cut the rest of the landscaping out of.

We will use a curvilinear design theme to lay out our bed lines. See my post on Curvilinear landscape design for some guidance on doing this.

While we are at it, lets add a light post near the driveway to help light the walkway and the front yard during the evening.

Front yard design using landscaper's favorites Bed lines added
Bed lines and a light post are added.

On next week’s post, we will continue this design by adding all the shrubs and begin adding some perennials. I hope to see you then!

 

Share on FacebookShare on TwitterSubscribe

Filed Under: Design

Comments

  1. Kate says

    August 6, 2017 at 4:25 pm

    I live in a house with a two car driveway, and since I’ve been working on my front yard landscaping it has been one of the features I dislike the most. It’s actually quite a bit like the set up here – except the garage is a two car garage. So basically when you look at my house – I feel like it is screaming – look at the driveway and garage!! ;p I’m working on a curvilinear planting area (also similar to this design) because I thought it might begin to pull the eye more toward the front door (and the planted area). And I’m also trying to use seasonal color (and a colorful pot) to reinforce this. Do you have any other ideas? I’ve thought about painting the garage door (it’s now white) to a color that will attract less attention – but since it is such a large visual space – it would be a big decision. I guess I could also stencil the garage door or paint/tint the drive – but I don’t want to scare the neighbors too much! 😉

    Reply
    • Jim says

      August 6, 2017 at 4:42 pm

      I would just try to create a focal point at your front entrance. Your eye will go to that and not be drawn to the garage door.

      Reply
  2. Karen says

    May 21, 2016 at 9:41 pm

    How do I know the diameter of each plant circle on the layout? The yard I want to plan is small and the circle sizes need to be very good estimates

    Reply
  3. Bill Plummer says

    September 27, 2015 at 9:14 am

    Why the curly front walk?
    Bluestone would have been great for the walk
    Why nut create a full bed between the driveway, the all and the house?
    I do not like the curlicue beds

    Reply
    • Jim says

      September 27, 2015 at 9:40 am

      This is one design of many possibilities. It will be pretty typical of a conventional design that would fit into the neighborhood norms, but be nicer I hope of course!

      Curvy beds seem to be the most used and wanted design theme. So that is why I did that. We will explore other themes more in future designs.

      Bluestone is probably my favorite hardscape material, but for this modest house a high quality concrete paver for a much lower budget can look pretty nice as nice

      I did once make a plan for my front yard that enclosed it all with a hedge and made it a more densely planted area then this design will be.

      Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

This website or its third-party tools use cookies, for more information on data we may collect about you see our Privacy policy.
I use affiliate links and may earn a commission if you purchase through my links. To learn more, check this out.
© 2018 Jim Anderson