How To Design A Beautiful Front Garden

The first thing you want to think about when designing a front garden is the overall layout and style of your home and property. The goal of the front garden is to bring about your home’s exterior beauty in a way that complements it, and to do that, just fashion your garden to your home’s interior. Take this image, for example. Here, we have a rather large two storey home. The style of the home seems to be rustic, and the owner’s choice of greenery and flowering plants in front accentuates that rural vibe. The vines on the façade of the home also contribute to the bucolic nature of the property. If you have an Asian style home, however, you would benefit from planting bonsai trees or cherry blossoms in your front garden to further express your home’s interior style.

The next thing we want to think about is the size and location of the plants in the garden. Notice how the majority of the plant life in this image is low-lying. There is one large deciduous tree in front of the home and it’s next to smaller shrubs and flowering plants. The low-lying vegetation doesn’t obstruct the view of the house, accentuating the home’s architectural beauty. For this reason, making sure that your home is not veiled by vegetation is of the utmost importance. This home is able to have larger trees because of its stature. If you have a ranch style home, on the other hand, planting large trees can take away from your home’s aesthetic appeal by obstructing the view.

Now that you have an idea of how to plan your front garden, let’s think about what will really make your garden pop, and that’s the flowers. Flowers come in a multitude of different sizes, shapes, and colours that are virtually uncountable, which is why it is such a shame when homeowners don't use plant combinations in their gardens. With so many different plants to choose from, why would you stick to just one or two varieties? Combining plants of different sizes, shapes, and (most importantly) colours is essential to making your garden the idyllic place you want it to be. The only thing you have to be mindful of is each individual plant’s personal growth needs. Some plants that grow well together, and are strikingly beautiful, are geraniums, marigolds, and roses, just to name a few.

Now let’s consider the layout of your garden. Have you ever thought about a vertical garden? Vertical gardens are ideal for smaller spaces where options are limited. These areas mostly urban areas, but with this clever design idea, you can make the most out of the space you have. Vertical gardens maximize your space because they grow upward, and they also help to nurture other plants because they are up off the ground, improving air circulation. They also add character to your property. Not very many people utilize vertical gardens, so having one of your own will really make your property stand out. Some of the best plants for a vertical garden are sword fern, lipstick plant, pothos, wax flower, and wedding vine.

One thing about your garden – it doesn’t last all year round. Even if you don’t live in a climate that has four seasons, a plants lifecycle, or flowering cycle, has a start and an end. In order to keep your garden looking beautiful all year long, you should consider adding some evergreen plants. Evergreens are just as their name suggests – green the whole year through. They survive the harsh winter period, and even harsher summer days. If you live in a rather unchanging climate, though, you should consider trees with different coloured leaves, such as the smoke tree, the purple leaf plum, the red leaf maple, and the red-silver crabapple. Not only do they provide additional colour to your front yard, but they provide it in a different way and texture, giving your garden a nice variety.

Balance and repetition can frame an entryway or add a classy charm to your garden. There are countless garden accents and accessories you can incorporate into your front garden to help you complement your home and landscape design. Many accents like stepping stones, arbors, and trellises are functional and also allow you to add a little personality to your design. It’s important that your accents and accessories support your home’s style, as we’ve said earlier. A traditional setting would benefit from symmetrical pairings of accents, like the use of urns bordering a walkway, for example. A good starting point for planning the symmetry of things is to select one large item to establish the mood, theme, or style, and then to add additional aligned accents to what you’ve started with.

Just about any plant can be grown in a planter. This is true of houseplants, perennials, annuals, shrubs, or even trees. Growing your plants in containers provides you with a few advantages that permanent plantings can’t offer. Perhaps the biggest advantage is that you can move these planters around any time you want, giving you the option to change your garden’s style whenever you want. Moving the plants also allows you to take full advantage of the sun and move them in places where they can get more (or less, depending on the plant) sunlight. You can even move your fully grown flowering plant that you’ve been working so hard to grow to the center stage of your garden and show it off.