Garden Ideas: Easy-Care Front Design Garden
How to create a low-maintenance front garden design that’s both functional and looks great throughout the year
While a backyard can be a self-indulgent private haven, your front garden design has to be both functional and provide a warm welcome throughout the year. Unfortunately, a front garden is all too often the Cinderella patch that’s left till last or just neglected altogether. This shouldn’t be the case, since it’s your gardening shop-window to the world - providing the first impression to visitors and passers-by, alike. It makes sense to put a bit of effort into making it look good, but that doesn’t mean it has be time-consuming to look after. Although most people would prefer a front garden that largely looked after itself, don’t be tempted to replace it with wall-to-wall block paving. This not only looks grim, but may present drainage problems and will do nothing for value of the property or the desirability of the neighbourhood. Once one garden has been paved over, it’s only a matter of time before the whole street is a series of private car parks. The good news is that there are many things you can do to reduce the maintenance time of a front garden without compromising on the overall appearance. Here’s how…
How to save time and money
- Keep the design simple
- Replace the lawn with an easy-care alternative
- Add stepping stones within your borders for easy access
- Use low-maintenance shrubs and perennials
- Include attractive paving
- Use drought-tolerant plants in containers
Covering the ground Lawns have been a traditional component of front gardens for generations, opening up the space and providing a neat canvas around which beds and borders can be arranged. Unfortunately, most front garden lawns are small and awkward to keep in trim – especially if you have to carry the mower around from the back garden. What's more, many front gardens are deep in the shadow of surrounding buildings or street trees, so grass struggles to thrive as moss and weeds invade your patch, while other front gardens are steeply sloped making mowing much more difficult. The simple solution is to replace the lawn with an equally pleasing, but low-maintenance alternative.
A front garden lawn is rarely used and so doesn’t have to be as hard wearing as the back garden would. This means you can replace grass at the front with low-growing ground-cover plants that require little or no maintenance. A combination of low-growing evergreen shrubs and perennials will provide an ever-changing tapestry of colour and interest that will just require picking over a few times a year to remove wind-blown leaves and litter. For example, the ground-hugging evergreen shrub Cotoneaster horizontalis, that has white summer flowers and red autumn berries, will spread by rooting at the tips to form a weed-suppressing blanket. Or, in a sunny spot, the creeping Ceanothus thyrsiflorus var. repens, carries powder-blue early summer flowers on low, evergreen mounds. Combine these with variegated evergreen perennials, such as Ajuga reptans 'Atropurpurea' with its stubby spires of bright blue flowers in spring, or spreading mats of periwinkle that cope well with either sun or shade. The variegated evergreen bittersweet, Euonymus fortunei 'Emerald Gaiety', is another good choice to help lift the darker spots, while the pollution-tolerant, prostrate, silvery evergreen shrubby veronica, Hebe pinguifolia 'Pagei' that has fleshy, blue-green leaves smothered with masses of white flowers during May and June, is a reliable performer.
Better by design Most front gardens are small, especially in urban settings, and these are more difficult to plant successfully because they will inevitably be dominated by the surrounding building, paths steps and walls. Many have a simple path bisecting the plot running between the front door and garden gate with lawns or borders filling the spaces either side. Though perfectly functional, this layout will make the garden seem cramped, focusing the eye directly on the front door so that garden is ignored altogether. You can increase the sense of space and make your garden the focus of attention by using a couple of simple design tricks. First introduce a kink, a zig-zag, or better still, a sinuous curve into the path so that it is no longer straight. Then add bold shapes to the borders on either side that draw the eye. For example alongside a curving path, a semi-circular design would work well, while against a straight path a diamond-shape design will catch the eye. You can increase the sense of space further by having an open picket or railing fence that allows light in and glimpses of what lies beyond.
Some areas of paving in the form of paths and driveways are inevitable in a front garden but you can disguise stark looking large expanses of paving by adding plants and using a variety of materials. But don’t over do it. Two or three different types of paving materials are sufficient in most circumstances. Alternatively you can create a mosaic using pebbles or other hard-wearing decorative material, embedded in concrete. I had a go at making one for myself when I visited a mosaic-rich suburban garden recently.
Containers are a great way of adding the finishing touch to a front garden, especially if there are large areas of paving. To minimise the workload, choose large, non-porous containers that won’t need watering every week. Where practicable, stand the base of the container on bare soil to encourage the container plants’ roots to penetrate the soil underneath. This will not only make them easier to look after, but will keep them more secure. Choose easy-care drought-tolerant plants that can cope if you forget to water them now again and if you are near a busy road, they should be pollution-tolerant too.
