Unique Landscaping Ideas for Your Front Yard

Your front yard and walkway will make the first impression on the visiting guests. A non-descript and boring front space is not what you want as this is the most significant part of your house - the one immediately visible to any outsider. Moreover, sprucing it up with a simple but elegant front yard design can easily hike your property value by a good margin.

In this article we will provide some simple to implement front yard landscaping ideas that are easy on budget and labor.

Evaluate without prejudice

The first step to improving is to accept the drawbacks. Be your own critic and evaluate the look and feel of your frontyard. It is of assistance to take a few pictures of the front space and look at them with a critical eye. Start taking notes on what feels out of place, boring and down-right ugly in your front yard.

1. Are the hedges looking out of shape and shabby?
2. Is there color in front of your yard or is it drab?
3. How's the lawn looking from the front?
4. How's do your garden plants affect the look of your house entrance?
5. How's the walkway designed, are there any items of interest there?

If there are any changes to be made with respect to the structure of the walkway, curb, driveway or the entrance door, go ahead and make it. The entrance door may need a new coat of paint, the walkway may need to be widened a bit, the driveway may need to be given a better shape or paint - these design changes can be a little expensive but if needs to be done, you will need to do it.

This article however concentrates more on how to landscape front yard using garden plants in general. It is easy to implement these changes and it's all about improving your front yard's beauty with the use of plants. Listed below are the changes you can undertake.

Improve your foundation plantings

Foundation plantings do the function of adding color to the base of a house. They are critical to the beauty and elegance of any house. If you have dried up flower plants, dying grass, shapeless hedges and sluggish vines sprawling across your foundation then it's time to do away with it. You can either hire a gardener to do the job or you can put in some effort of your own, either way get new plants in there and spruce it up. Here are few land scaping ideas you can implement.

1. Employ ornamental grasses. They are the best plants to have around the foundation due to their bushy nature. Feather reed grass, fountain grass or blue fescue can grow in close clumps to add natural boundary to your foundation.
2. Make use of dwarf evergreen shrubs to add a small hedge along the foundation. Regular trimming and pruning will keep the hedge in excellent shape. Check out this article on evergreen shrubs for front yard garden.
3. Plant some colorful perennials or annuals in the interspaces between the evergreen shrubs or ornamental grass. It is not wise to make the entire border out of flowering plants as they will start looking clumsy when their blossoms die off.

Take the time to check out the various ornamental grass varieties in your local nurseries or online nurseries. If you have never tried them before you are in for a surprise, these plants are very addictive.

Liven up your home entrance

Instead of a drab concrete entrance to your door why not jazz things up with colorful annuals, in containers, lined on either side of it? You can use the dwarf varieties like primroses and rocky mountain zinnia or even some daffodils. The objective is to add color to the doorway. Use flowers of the same color instead of a mix; it looks a lot more symmetrical and pleasing to the eye. So if you are using pink flowers then keep it all pink, you can have different shades of it though.

You can easily buy containers from the nurseries for this purpose. Ornamental containers can also be purchased if you can live with the cost. Some of the best landscaping ideas for the front yard concentrate on the creative use of container plants to add life to a dull entrance.

Line up your walkway with flowers

There is nothing more welcoming than a walkway full of flowers. Do you remember visiting a friend's house and admiring the cute roses lined up along their walkway? Flowers along the walkway are eye-catching simply because that's the first thing you notice when you enter the gate. Walkways are always the highlight of all front yard landscaping

Here again you should use a series of the same color or you can even alternate colors. Knockout roses are excellent for this purpose. You can even plant simple marigolds for their blooming power and thick fragrance.

Work with arches, trellis, arbor and lattice

There is nothing more eye-catching than rose vines sprawling up an arbor giving off large blossom. In fact, vines in general look great and they add a touch of wilderness to your house. It is quite easy to set up an arbor or lattice (available commercially) and let some vines grow all over them. Jasmine, morning glory and roses are great flowering plants that vine around. You can even plant climbing ivy or akebia to give that unique look.

Check out our article on flowering vines that can be used in landscaping designs for the front yard.

Green foliage and colorful flowers can liven up the drabbest of front spaces. With some simple planning you can come up with an elegant front yard design solely through the use of flowering and evergreen plants. We hope this article provided you with some interesting front yard landscaping ideas that will impress your future guests.