Gardening Your Front Yard: Projects and Ideas for Big and Small Spaces

by Tara Nolan

Includes Vegetable Gardening, Pollinator Plants, Rain Gardens, and More!

Gardening Your Front Yard is an active, inspiring resource that shows you how to treat your front yard like a backyard without sacrificing beauty, from choosing the right plants to building front patios and walkways.

With her unique combination of DIY/building savvy and gardening expertise, author Tara Nolan (Raised Bed Revolution) weaves you past the main pitfalls you may encounter when trying to fit a garden or gardens between your home and the street. This beautiful and comprehensive hardcover book shows how to accomplish several hardscape projects, such as building front patios, borders, edging, and walkways, as well as making your own raised beds, planting containers, trellises, rose arbors, privacy screens, and more—all custom-designed for the rigors of front-yard gardening.

Gardening Your Front Yard is a garden book in every sense of the word, however. Choosing the right plants is even more important when you are dealing with a small, highly visible area with less than ideal growing conditions—all common traits of most front yards. You will find advice on training vines up brickwork and planting around foundation walls, planting boulevards/hell strips, and you’ll even take a trip into the side yard. Shade gardens, privacy screening, and security dos and don'ts are covered, plus how to intermingle edibles and landscape plants, cactus and succulent gardens, birdbaths, and much, much more.

With the sage advice and step-by-step projects of this comprehensive guide, convert your front yard from a bland grasscape to a vital living space.

Genres: Gardening, Nonfiction, Plants

208 pages, Hardcover

First published March 10, 2020

About the author

Tara Nolan is a garden writer and editor who regularly writes about gardening for the Toronto Star, as well as for magazines, including Reader’s Digest and Canadian Living. She is one quarter of the popular website Savvy Gardening and was the award-winning web editor of Canadian Gardening magazine’s website for six years. Tara also does work for the Toronto Botanical Garden and the Canadian Garden Council, and volunteers for the Royal Botanical Garden. Her first gardening book, Raised Bed Revolution, will be published in May 2016.

Reviews

[Alicia Bayer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I expected this book to focus a lot more on edible front yard gardens but I still found it immensely fun, helpful and inspirational. Nolan provides lots of photos of fabulous front yard gardens of all kinds to reduce your grass and add beauty, interest and sustainability to your front yard. Edible gardens are included, as are ideas to sneak in edible plants in attractive ways (such as a tomato plant in a decorative metal obelisk). Projects are also included for building raised beds of all kinds, making edging and lots more.

I read a temporary digital ARC of this book for the purpose of review.

[Ell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is more than meets the eye at first glance. It features inspirational front yard curb appeal along with the practical tips that go along with it, such planting around a foundation, starting raised beds and pathways and working with an incline. It covers privacy planting, container gardening and small space landscaping. But what makes this book stand out among others like it is the inclusion of some cool DIY plans for projects that I haven’t seen before.

[Natalie all_books_great_and_small · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received a copy of this book to read in exchange for an honest review via netgalley and the publishers.

This is a great book to get you started and clued up on gardening and has some really great ideas within it for any sized garden - big or small. It gives great tips and refreshing ideas, but also offers advice as to when you may need to bring in a professional and even has some fabulous eco friendly ideas too. It shows you step by step how to make planters etc using wood and all the tools you will need for each project. It gives so much information about a broad range of things such as paths, whether to have grass, plants to use etc.
This is definitely a handy book to be within any home book collection.

[Brittney // brittysbooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you NetGalley and Cool Springs Press for this ARC.

There’s so much to love in this book. As a new homeowner, I don’t know how to decorate my inside or outside of my house. This was a great stepping stone with how to arrange my gardens and make DIY projects! I loved this book and found it super helpful with how to arrange and make things for a happy garden.

[Walt · Rating 2 out of 5]

I do not read gardening books, but I can provide an unbiased account of this book. It is a coffee table book. There are a lot of lovely pictures. There are some cute ideas. There are brief blurbs about...many things, privacy, veggies, DIY arts and crafts. But it all was way too brief to offer insight or guidance. The result is that the blurbs / prose was too distracting. Either offer advice and insight, or offer straight up ideas. Trying to mix the two concepts resulted in disappointment.

For example, one of the "chapters" that caught my attention was the bug hotel. OK. Pollinators good, bugs bad. Let us build a bug hotel? Some folks, like the author, may be able to make it look pleasing and blend it in with the shrubbery. I suspect amateurs would just raise bugs. A lot of information seems to be missing.

Similarly, another chapter talks about socializing. It is tricky to imagine what the author is referring to. One of the pictures includes the heart-warming story of a mail man who would rest beside the garden, so the home-owner installed a bench....for folks to rest in their yard. Sounds strange to me.

The author tries to cover too much in too little space. The result is that the book seems confused. Is it gardening? Arts and Crafts? Sociology? Who knows. Bottom line, this book is for folks who already know a lot about gardening in their environment. This is not for beginners.

[Alexis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is exactly how it presents itself: it shows you how to garden a front yard from plants to furnishings. As someone in a condo, I read this to help get ideas for my parents' front yard, but some ideas I could also repurpose for myself. I liked that the focus was so broad and many elements of garden design were mentioned. Should we plant grass? How do you deal with a sloping property? What if I move? How do things get pollinated?
There is also some mention of container gardening, and eco-friendly options for your outside, as well as some container designs if you feel handy enough. It's not broad enough to keep the condo dweller satisfied, but to those with front properties, this should begin to cover what you're looking for.

[Shiva · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was very much interested to read this book as it was recommended by an avid gardener that I follow on social media.
Let’s talk about the pros first: Nolan is a Canadian author and familiar with the canadian climate living in Ontario, so she has excellent recommendations in terms of selecting plants and planning our yards. I especially liked her chapter where she advises on planting salt friendly plants because of the amount of salt we get in the winter from the snow plowers!

She writes about every aspect of yard planing: from selecting plants to rain and water considerations and then hardscaping, so a very well balanced book for a beginner gardener. There are images in the book to go with her recommendations and also several projects such as making a diy rain barrel, a planter, and more.

On a low note, there was not that much said that I haven’t read in social media of other gardeners that I follow. Most of the info is online and accessible with a quick google.

3 Stars
⭐️⭐️⭐️

[Maureen · Rating 4 out of 5]

It has some nice ideas, not all ridiculously over the top. I'm looking for ideas for my small backyard, and I think it's teasing some brain cells into activity.

[Robert Lewis · Rating 3 out of 5]

To say this book is just about front-yard gardening is a bit of a misnomer. While that's the theme that unites its various chapters and discussions, most of the ideas are equally applicable to front, back, side, or any other kind of yard you might have. On one major point, though, this might be just the right book at just the right time; a lot of people seem dissatisfied with the homogeneous (and all-too-often HOA-mandated) simple front lawns and are looking for new ideas to landscape the front of their homes. The lawn, which we all seem to take for granted as the ideal of front-yard landscaping, was brought to the New World (quite literally--they brought the seeds with them) by wealthy immigrants who wanted a reminder of their ancestral homes. Fair enough, and lawn mowers and irrigation systems and pesticides have made the lawn accessible to the masses in more recent times. But frankly, as much as I can enjoy lounging in a well-manicured lawn, I don't understand the desire for everyone's front yard to look fundamentally the same. If you're looking to stand out a bit, this book offers a lot of ideas from which to draw inspiration.

And that--inspiration--is where this book shines. Filled with photos of the kinds of yards and gardens of which I remain quite envious, and yet relevant for those with almost any type of space--big or small, flat or sloped, dry or rainy--this book is almost guaranteed to give you some ideas you'll like to use, be they for a complete re-landscaping project or merely the addition of a planter. While it's probably not the kind of book you're meant to read straight through in a single sitting, that's exactly what I did. Since it's dominated more by photos than by text, it's a quick read, and it's given me a lot to think about.

Where it falls short, though, is in practical how-to advice. Yes, it is sprinkled with step-by-step projects for a variety of purposes, and those are actually quite well described, especially considering they're only allotted a couple pages each. However, what I found myself constantly wishing the book offered were more tips regarding what types of plants grow under which conditions, when to plant different types of seeds, how to account for a variety of environmental factors that can plague gardeners. Of course there are other books on the subject, so I didn't expect an encyclopedic treatment in a book meant to be more of an idea book, but it would at least have been helpful to have some notes to accompany each of the ideas regarding how to adapt them to a variety of circumstances.

At the end of the day, this really is an enjoyable book, and it's the kind of thing you'll want to flip through whenever you're looking for a new gardening idea. However, when it comes to actually planning out how to execute that idea, you'll need to look elsewhere.

(Note: In accordance with policy, I must declare that I received a free copy of this book for review.)

[Red · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chapter 2 says it all for me…"Front Yard Living is a return to being social in the front yard." The author has included lots of inspiring colorful pictures of front yards. Hints, things that you need to think about before starting, when you might need to hire a professional…all things included in this book. She shows you things that you might want to do in your yard, whatever size it might be. This would be a great reference book to sit on your coffee table and let your guest browse thru. Then take them outside and tell them what your plans are…maybe they’ll volunteer to help.

[ThePausis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Copia avanzada a cambio de una reseña honesta.

Tiene todo para ser un manual básico de jardinería y más, teniendo en cuenta que hay diseños de estantes, macetas, y más que uno mismo puede construir, incluso añade listas de lo que necesitamos para hacerlos nosotros mismos.

La edición es hermosa, se nota que tanto la autora como los editores han tenido mucho cuidado y cariño en la maquetación de todos estos datos. Las imágenes seleccionadas son muy explicativas por si misma y la lectura de las indicaciones se hace muy facil gracias a ellas.

Tengo una huerta orgánica y poco espacio para extenderla, asi que este libro me viene de maravilla.

[Allison · Rating 5 out of 5]

The idea of gardening your front yard isn't a new one but it can seem overwhelming and often people just do the basics, grass and a bit of foundation planting because they just don't know what else to do. This book will help you decide what kind of garden will fit your personality and your house for the best curb appeal ever.

Ms. Nolans book is certainly the best place to start. Gardening Your Front Yard, is full of ideas for all kinds of yard spaces; on an incline, small spaces or dry areas, it's all covered. Tons of ideas with pictures to give you a visual of what kinds of plants work best in different kinds of areas. It tackles the common misconception that you have to have a large area and tons of money, nope, you can use pops of color or containers to liven up a courtyard on a budget.
She covers other problems, shade, planting under trees and high traffic areas too!
This book covers what most would consider when planning a front yard garden, flowering plants ground covers and shrub, but that's not all, it dives into the wonderful world of vegetable gardening too! Why grow grass when you can grow food!
Along those same lines is the chapter on Eco Friendly front yards, Rain barrels and planting for pollinators and wildlife is covered too.
And it's not all about the plants either, she also covers ideas for pathways, boarders and fences. Just the thing to tie your new garden all together to a beautiful space.
Plus there are lots of easy to follow plans for projects for your garden. Such as planters, window boxes and even seating for when you want to sit back and enjoy that paradise that you have created.
Over all it's a beautiful book for all levels of gardeners, and full of ideas for all kinds of areas. It would be a good addition to any homeowners library or a gift for that new homeowner in your life!
Thanks to Net Hally and the Publisher for a free electronic copy of the book in exchange for an honest review. I've gotten so many good ideas for a garden at my home and I think you will too!

[Annie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Originally published on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

Gardening Your Front Yard is a moderately comprehensive tutorial for turning unexploited yard areas into productive gardening spaces. Due out 10th March 2020 from Quarto on their Cool Springs Press imprint, it's 208 pages and will be available in hardcover format.

This is a well written and engaging tutorial which really deconstructs and creatively looks at the front lawn area of most suburban homes. This isn't about ripping up lawn and letting native plants ("weeds") run rampant, but rather about creatively re-imagining and utilizing the space for alternative purposes, whether entertaining or bio-friendly goals.

The first chapter's introduction focuses on seeing what the reader's constraints and possibilities are and brainstorming creatively. There are practical project tutorials in all of the chapters. The first (introductory) chapter includes a really good treatise on decreasing street noise and increasing security (no bushes or trees should block the sight line to the front door, for example).

The following chapters' projects are arranged roughly thematically: increasing green rooms at the front of the house for social/entertaining, flowers and foliage beds (including a great tutorial on making a cutting garden as well as attracting native pollinators), attractive vegetable gardening which work in the front yard (yes, it's possible!), xeriscaping (water saving), and permaculture and other features like sedum carpets.

There are a lot of good and usable takeaways in this collection. The photography is stellar and the writing is clear. Four stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

[Patty · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a wonderful book. It is a celebration of making your front yard useful instead of just having a lawn. It gives you plans that are attractive and useful for creating the kind of garden you want whether it be a small vegetable garden, a pollinator garden or a place to revel in the glory of native plants.

Inside you will find suggestions, plans, and guides to help you work with the space you have to make the best use of your enviroment. But be sure you comply with any rules in your neighborhood before you start planting/building. I know sadly, that some places won’t let you plant vegetables in your front yard. I don’t understand why but I do know that these places exist. There are projects like decorative rain barrels and different plant stands to add to porches, decks or just general outdoor decor.

There are a lot of clever ideas but some of them might not appeal to those in more planned communities but that does not mean you still can’t add some bee and butterfly friendly plants to your landscape design. Every little bit does help!

My house doesn’t have a front yard and a back yard in that we have most of our land dedicated to food production and our house is set back on our lot to take advantage of the view of the river. The hubby is looking to do some landscaping around the yurt to pretty it up a bit but it also has to be fire wise given the conditions in which we live. He said he found some projects in the book that will be useful for different ideas that he has for future projects.

[Pam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you NetGalley and Quarto Publishing for the opportunity to read and give an honest review of this book.

Thirty some years ago I started out with a sweeping front yard of grass and overgrown evergreens. Over the years I totally transformed the front yard into flower gardens where people would walk by and stop to see what was blooming seasonly and ask for seeds or a start of a desirable plant. So, you can tell I am totally into front yard gardening and have been for some time.

This author appears to be knowledgable about landscaping and has also included numerous small DIY building projects to enhance your front yard garden.

The photos are attractive except for the ones in which layers of shrubs appear to take over the front yard obscuring the house while looking unkempt and overgrown.

This book contains many useful ideas whether the front yard is small or massive. It focuses on the use of: flowers, vegetables, shrubs, trees, walkways, furniture, and container planting as well as many other things.
A useful addition to this book is the guide to sources included at the back.

Gardeners of various experiences would find this book a useful addition to their gardening reference library.

[Susan Bewley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will freely admit, I was very impressed with Gardening Your Front Yard: Projects and Ideas for Big and Small Spaces. Many of the ideas in this book are beautiful and deal with many common issues you have trying to grow a garden in your front yard. While I do not live in an HOA, it doesn’t mean I don’t want to have the front yard looking nice, especially after seeing one of our neighbors fail at doing what I want in the yard (they destroyed the aesthetics of their front yard). I won’t lie though, some of the ideas are very time consuming but worth it if you want something practical and beautiful, focusing on various DIY projects, picking the right plants, and the techniques you need to make everything work. Overall, if you want a front yard garden, I highly recommend getting Gardening Your Front Yard: Projects and Ideas for Big and Small Spaces so you can start planning for spring garden now!

[Carlen Zhang-D'Souza · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Omnivore’s Dilemma examines how we can eat, plant, and grow better, and Tara Nolan’s Gardening Your Front Yard offers way to experiment with those concepts at home–from very simple (where should you put these tomato plants?) to more complex (creating pollinator palaces)–for all types of living.

Small apartments, mid-size condos, large front yards, houses that can manage permeable paving; Nolan covers it all, and explains a wide breadth of options that beginner or experienced growers can utilize to grow food, welcome bees and other pollinators, decrease the impact of extreme downpours, and be flexible. The front yard is a pliable space, and she urges us to use it creatively and practically, for the good of ourselves and our world.

Read more at www.pithysummary.com!

[(a)lyss(a) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received a copy of this book through the Amazon Vine program in exchange for an honest review.

This is a great book!

There's beautiful pictures and step by step guides to turning your front yard into a garden. From tearing out the lawn to deciding what to plant there's information on how to plan your front yard's transformation. There's also tips on how to create your front yard a living social space like putting in a bench or restoring outdoor furniture.

This is a very informative guide to planting edible and non edible plants in your yard.

[Bridget]

I can't even say I have a black thumb. I'm not knowledgable enough to say that I tried and failed. But I my passion for delicious and wholesome food has made me aware that what we eat is only as good as the soil it grows in. With that in mind, I've been interested in ways to make my yard more eco-friendly (attracting pollinators, etc.) AND attractive. I took some notes, and I'll start taking some baby steps next spring. Tara Nolan's book has great ideas for veteran green thumbs and aspiring not-black thumbs!

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Worth picking up and flipping through. The author balances front yard planting concepts with examples and attention to functional cultivation.

I enjoyed the DIY instructions, although they are more friendly to intermediate constructors vs beginners.

You may learn some things and may get inspired, but don't expect regional tips or deep dives into specific plants. This is half higher level cultivation strategies and half DIY instructions.

[Ligaya · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe it's just because I've read a ton of gardening books lately, but I didn't learn anything new here. I did enjoy all the gorgeous photos but I wish the author had included where these gardens are located. It was a bonus to have the projects interspersed within the garden highlights, but, then again, none of the projects were interesting enough for me to want to try them!

[False · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm decades past this book. If for a beginner gardener, then it might prove helpful. The chapters are: The Front Yard Comes Into Focus, Front Yard Living: A Return to Being Social in the Front Yard, Front Yard Flowers Foliage and Groundcover, Growing Vegetables in Front Yards, Eco Friendly Front Yards and Front Yard Garden Embellishments.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

This visually appealing book doesn't have much new information on gardening in one's yard, but I like the variety of landscaping projects. Projects include photographs, instructions and measurements to build a pergola, arbor, obelisk, and a staircase planter. Also included are tips for creating concrete mowing borders, paths, and raised beds on unlevel ground.

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great inspiration book full of photographs of a wide variety of homes and front yard gardens, as well as step-by-step instructions on how to build a few smaller garden structures and implements. Lots of ideas here.

[Witch-at-Heart · Rating 4 out of 5]

This front yard gardening book exceeded my expectations! The instructions are very detailed and informative. It is filled with excellent pictures and tips for choosing intermixing plants and arranging yard space. I received this book from NetGalley for an honest review.

[Annarella · Rating 4 out of 5]

An informative and useful book, full of hints and ideas.
I liked how it is organised, the beautiful pictures and the well written texts.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

[PermaPrepper · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some really good and practical layouts and projects in this book. Has useful advice on achieving a great many goals, such as privacy, security, planting difficult areas, and using unconventional vertical planting.

[Brenna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book to give you ideas and things to think about when it comes to changing your yard for a garden. I also appreciate that it had some simple projects in the book as well. Really great intro book for changing up your yard.

[Andrea Wright · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fantastic idea book for front yard makeovers and just the kind of book that I would check out from the library to get some great ideas from. In fact I can't wait to do just that!!

[Kirsten Lost 2022 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tonnes of inspiration and ideas in here, as well as practical DIY plans, guidance for planning and much more besides. Very good.