Front Gardens to Make You Smile
As well as adding kerb appeal to your home, a well-planted front garden improves the environment by reducing pollution and providing wildlife habitats. Coming home to a lovely scent and colour can also improve your health and happiness.
In terms of plants, evergreen shrubs will give the garden year-round good looks. Balls or domes of shrubs such as yew, osmanthus, pittosporum or prunus lusitanica will create a strong structure, and a hedge will absorb pollution and increase wildlife.
Then add your colour and scent with perennials and shrubs that flower throughout the season. Winter-flowering beauties such as cyclamen and hellebores, and mood-boosting scented shrubs such as Viburnum x burkwoodii, daphne, hamamelis and sarcococca are great for front gardens as you’ll pass them and get a lift throughout the winter months. Summer-flowering aromatic flowers include lavender, roses, jasmine and honeysuckle. Wisteria will also create a wow factor.
Hard-working, tough perennials such as Alchemilla mollis, nepeta, geraniums, erigeron, geum and drought-tolerant sedum and salvia for sun or ferns and anemones for shade are good fillers. Ornamental grasses and tall perennials create movement in sunnier front gardens.
A small ornamental specimen tree with blossom and autumn colour, such as an Amelanchier lamarckii, cherry, magnolia, hawthorn or Acer, adds height and seasonal interest to a front garden. They’re also beautiful to look out onto from your window whilst screening you from passers-by on the street. And they’re wonderful for wildlife and a good place for hanging a bird feeder. Do your research first, though and make sure you’re picking the right tree for the location and nothing that will get too big.
In terms of landscaping, as well as plenty of planting beds, keep to permeable hard surfaces such as gravel. And why not tuck a bench somewhere with a little screening to enjoy your garden as well as your community – a great spot for a drink on a sunny evening.