18 Simple Ways to Turn Your Front Yard Garden into a Focal Point

Create a Curvy Path

A colorful flower garden is the perfect way to dress up your front yard. Boost the visual impact by installing a gently curving walkway as the border to your flowerbeds—this brings a casual feel that a straight sidewalk lacks. Incorporate cheery container gardens by the front door to add even more color, texture, and fragrance.

Embrace the Cottage-Garden Look

If you're intimidated by gardening "rules," embrace the cottage-garden aesthetic, which is freewheeling, overflowing, and totally laidback. You don't have to live in an actual cottage: This easygoing approach pairs well with most house styles. A simple white picket fence makes a fantastic backdrop for your cottage garden's summer show.

This quaint example includes purple iris, red and apricot roses, and creeping thyme, but any romantic flowers, such as roses, peonies, or hydrangeas, are well-suited to the style.

Save Yourself from Trimming

A front yard flower garden can make your landscape easier to care for since there's less mowing and edging to worry about. Here, colorful blooms dress up a traditional white picket fence and eliminate the need for using a string trimmer alongside it.

Test Garden Tip: Make your front yard flower garden extra appealing by incorporating fragrant flowers, such as sweet pea, Oriental lily, and herbs.

Accent Your Front Porch

If you have a front porch, add a skirt of colorful flowers. Even a tiny pocket planting such as the one shown here offers big color and interest in the front yard. Mix annuals with perennials and bulbs—and a dwarf evergreen or two—so you can enjoy the display all year long.

Create a Flagstone Path

Transform your front yard into a full-blown garden by putting in loosely spaced flagstones in lieu of a sidewalk. (Note: This is probably not practical in snowy winter climates.) Low-maintenance groundcovers between the stones create a carpet of color and interest.

Soften Your Sidewalk

Instead of mowing that narrow strip of yard between your fence and the sidewalk, fill it with a flower garden. The blooms add color and interest and prevent the fence from feeling like a barrier. This makes your front yard appear more welcoming.

Flaunt Lots of Color

Don't be afraid of color in your front yard. An assortment of shades gives this landscape a romantic cottage-garden sensibility. Climbing roses on the pergola over the front entry perfume the air, and a clipped boxwood hedge helps define the yard's boundary for a cozy enclosed feel.

Look to Jewel Tones

Soft pinks and delicate yellows are gorgeous, but why not go a bit bolder? Here, bright red bougainvilleas clothe the front porch, while white marguerite daisies and blue lobelia playfully cloak the front walk. Vibrant yellow pansies add a bit of extra sparkle. Choosing an unexpected color combination—like one built around jewel tones—will make your garden stand out.

Make a Statement in Spring

Orchestrate a can't-miss debut each spring with colorful bulbs, cool-season flowers (such as pansies), and spring-flowering trees and shrubs (like this redbud). As the bulbs fade, later-blooming perennials will take center stage. Accent them with summer-flowering annuals and perennials.

Repeat Effectively

Repetition is a trick that garden designers use to create balance and cohesiveness. To make your front yard interesting—but not overwhelming—repeat pockets of color. This can help draw the eye down a walkway or along the front of your house. Here, beautiful blue lobelia is joined by a riot of other early-blooming plants.

Bring in Lots of Texture

Spikes of low-maintenance Russian sage, sedum, and ornamental grasses, among other perennials and shrubs, add texture and color without making the front yard look unkempt or overbearing. A stretch of lawn between the foundation plantings and the sidewalk allows easy viewing of both flower gardens.

Incorporate Edible Plants

This flower-filled front yard garden incorporates lots of herbs and vegetables, too, making it a breeze to harvest fresh, homegrown produce. Planting flowers with your vegetables helps attract pollinators for extra yields.

Play Off Your Home's Architecture

This bright yellow house is the perfect backdrop for a colorful mix of blooms in a front yard garden. The happy-hued stucco wall, brick walkway, and eye-catching blooms combine beautifully to enhance the home's Spanish theme. Likewise, use the style of your home as inspiration for your plantings.

Frame the View

Draw attention to the prettiest part of your front yard. Clematis growing on an arbor makes an enticing entryway to this striking space. The towering arch creates a tunnel, offering the illusion that the yard is much larger than it actually is, while emphasizing the intricate gate and porch. Bright containers against the house help draw you in.

Live on the Edge

Don't neglect the curb. A street-side front yard flower garden creates a pocket of color away from the home and breaks up a large expanse of front lawn. Front yard flower gardens like this one pack lots of interest into a small amount of space—and attract birds, butterflies, and other wildlife.

Plant a Screen

Create a sense of privacy in your front yard by planting some taller specimens near your sidewalk. Airy plants will grow into a screen that allows visitors to peek through without having a wide-open view.

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