7 Rules for Front Yard Gardens
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This July (2011) the small Michigan Town of Oak Park was in the process of prosecuting homeowner Julie Bass for planting five raised gardens in front of her home. Her crime? Not using appropriate plants in the front yard. If convicted, she could have faced 93 days in jail.
Luckily for Julie, the story spread virally, and the case was undermined by exceptions written into the town's own policies; the town had to back down. The focus of this article is how to design and build a front yard garden while avoiding the negative attention in the first place.
Julie's gardens are a great case study for front yard food garden design: on one hand they are a cost effective start on developing a productive landscape in the city, and on the other, they demonstrate the perceptions that can still drive ignorant criticism from suburbanites who are firmly entrenched in the business as usual mindset. Using Julie's gardens as a reference, here is how to fend off trouble:
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Balance
Anything built in your front yard is going to have a strong visual presence. In isolation or overloaded on one side, this presence will be unbalanced.
The best solution for balance in Julie's garden would be to orient all five garden beds perpendicular to the house like the garden on the left in the picture. This arrangement also has other advantages, explained in the next rule.
Focal Point
In almost all suburban settings, the house remains the dominant feature. If a strong visual presence is put between the home and the vantage point of would-be critics, it will unfortunately make things look worse to them since they do not perceive beauty in function. In Julie's garden, the contrast between the red brick, light coloured mulch, and green/brown lawn probably exacerbated this issue.
Orienting the gardens perpendicular to the house reduces the continuous frontage of the garden beds, and having the long sides perpendicular to the frontal view rather than facing the viewer draws the eye more towards the house, the natural focal point for a normal sized suburban property. Anything that is so strong visually that it is more of a focus than the home itself, except for intensive landscaping, could be fodder for complainers.
Integration
Integration with the architecture: The above section explains that the house is the natural focal point, and that is an important part of integration.
The location of the entrance to the house is important, as it is often the center of the focus on a house, so using the garden beds for instance to visually frame the entrance can direct focus to the house and be complementary.
The other important aspect of integration with the house is how it is built itself: relating not so much to colour, but to the texture and materials used. Often, there will be a particular dimension of wood for raised garden construction that will relate best to the house. Lumber is often sold per board/foot, in which case a garden bed with the same overall height will not cost much if any more to make using a greater number of boards.
In Julie's case, gardens two 2x4's tall instead of one 2x8' tall may have matched up better to the finer texture made by the bricks versus siding for example, which would match better visually with 2x6' or 2x8' in almost any case. The additional line formed by using two boards to make the height of the garden bed instead of one also can draw attention more to the construction of the beds versus the contents themselves, and will also lead visually towards the house on the sides of perpendicular to the observer.
Integration with the landscape: in Julie's case, the slightly curving path towards the entrance of the house would be the best element in the landscape to relate to with the garden beds, and helps reinforce the leading of the eye towards the house. Shrubs or flowering plants could work well, especially closer to the house, and there are many edible choices.
Use the Lawn or Lose it
As mentioned in the Focal Point section, the contrast between the red brick, mulch and lawn are more than likely a driver of the negative perceptions of Julie's gardens. This is compounded by the poor condition of the lawn.
The first suggestion: keep any lawn you do retain in decent condition. Those suburbanites love them some green grass.
The second suggestion: the mulch is an unnecessary contrasting element. If the lawn was retained around the garden beds (and improved), Julie would have saved money on the cost of sod removal, not paid for the mulching and the front yard would have looked more elegant. For those worried about lawn creeping into the gardens, it is not difficult to make a barrier to encroachment. It is, for example, not a bad way to re-use old interlocking brick from landscaping renovations.
Retaining the lawn makes integrates it with the suburban ideal, and if you plan on retaining any grass, retaining it all may be cheaper and worth the extra minute or two of mowing.
Edible Landscaping
The stereotypical image of a rectangular food garden with rows of vegetables would likely draw criticism in the context of a suburban front yard.
Permaculture design uses polycultures to get higher overall yield in a given area and take advantage of synergies between plants that improve garden production and reduce labour input. The visual form of a permaculture garden often relates more to conventional landscaping than the traditional agriculture inspired food gardens.
Rosalind Creasy's Edible Landscaping demonstrates that an attractive landscape and food production aren't mutually exclusive. As with keeping the lawn, this is a case where you can give would-be critics exactly what they want to see - some style - while following permaculture design principles. There are many very aesthetically appealing food plants. Keep in mind that to the ignorant, many annual herbaceous food plants are 'weedy' looking, even tomatoes, so make sure to put the best looking plants out front where they can be seen if it doesn't compromise your production.
Craftsmanship & Construction
The difference in perception with a little more attention drawn to the quality and attention to detail of the raised beds themselves can gone a long way towards assuaging the fears of worried clients or neighbours. Wealthy clients have almost universally preferred a more complex garden design with an edge of some sort around the top, if nothing else, instead just a rectangular box holding in dirt.
Frontin' for the Haters
If all else fails, you can use visually pleasing plants to front the prominently visible parts of the raised gardens. This can be in the garden beds, or planted around them if done neatly. These don't necessarily have to be strictly aesthetic plants though, as mentioned in the edible landscaping section. There are many edible shrubs and flowers.
