A well-designed front-yard planting should provide a setting for a house but should not compete with it for attention.
Flowers and colorful trees and shrubs can easily dominate a landscape scene, but they may be used in the front of your house and still not steal attention from the house itself.
The pictures opposite and the one on the cover shows how four gardeners use color and, at the same time, have plantings that serve the primary purpose of showing off their houses to the best advantage.
Harmonize Color In The Foundation Planting
What could be more picturesque—a white house, blue shutters, pink dogwood, pink azaleas, and white lilacs?
The house and planting shown at the top of the opposite page are welded into a single identity.
The planting, which contains many colors, does not compete with the house for attention.
Because its colors harmonize with the house’s colors, it adds beauty to an already beautiful home.
Color schemes must be carefully thought out. You begin by choosing the colorful plants you like and then select the colors to paint your house.
You may work the other way around—house first, plants second—but it is more difficult to find just the right color in a plant than mixing paint to the proper shade for your house.
A harmonious scheme such as this need not be the same all season long.
This blue and pink scheme may change to blue and yellow in midsummer and then go to blue with a deep purple accent in the planting in early fall.
Nothing is confining when you use a harmonious color scheme. It just takes planning.
The City Lawn Demands A Colorful Treatment
Even the tiny city front yard can contain color. And if, as the case is likely to be, there is no space in the back of the house to garden in, color must go out front.
The small city lawn patch is not large enough to be considered a foreground for the house; therefore, color in great profusion is perfect taste.
The postage-stamp lawn on the left, bordered by tulips and pansies, illustrates the point perfectly.
A follow-up planting for summer color might include annuals, geraniums, or coleus, depending upon how much sunlight is available.
Use Color To Frame The Front-yard Scene
The planting of deep green shrubbery softens the foundation line of the house.
A planting of contrasting color has been introduced as a perimeter frame for the entire front-yard scene.
Pink roses do an admirable job here. While almost any other flowers or shrubs would be appropriate, mixing many colors in the perimeter frame would prove distracting and break the continuity of the entire front-yard scene.
The perimeter method of using contrasting colors is appropriate and straightforward and has yet another feature to recommend: you have a colorful planting to see from your windows.
Bright Colors Are Appropriate In The Dooryard
The architectural style of many houses calls for a garden in front—color is demanded.
The garden does not compete for attention but becomes a part of the house.
Think of Cape Cod cottages with a fence-enclosed dooryard garden. This garden belongs; the house would seem incomplete without it.
Every flower lover values the dooryard garden because it gives him a perfect opportunity to display his gardening talent.
A real artist created, with plants, the dooryard garden shown on the cover.
Scillas provide the drifts of blue and alyssum, making the yellow carpet a foil for the tulips and azaleas featured plants.
When planning a dooryard garden, be certain that winter interest is provided. As a matter of fact, no planting should be planned for only one short seasonal display.
You may not have bright colors throughout the year, but you can have a planting that will look good and complement your house.
This is the paramount function of any front-yard planting.