Front Yard Landscaping Ideas with Doug Scott

Effective front yard landscaping should visually and functionally guide guests to your home’s front door. In this Backyard Life video, landscape designer and Done-In-A-Weekend Projects host Doug Scott is here with several front-yard landscaping ideas that will help give your home the grand entrance it deserves.

Layering Your Plant Material

When considering what plants to install in your landscape beds, think—as you would a painting—in terms of layers. If you’re not up on painting lingo, that means a background, middle ground and foreground layer. Each layer serves a unique purpose—and there’s no more important place for those layers to be on display than at your home’s entrance: 

• Background: The background layer should consist of taller evergreen shrubs to ensure that—no matter what’s in front of them—you’ll always have something alive and green to look at.
• Middle Ground: The middle ground layer should be lower than the background layer, and allows you to add greater interest and texture with either contrasting evergreen or colorful perennial shrubs. 
• Foreground: Finally, the foreground layer should help transition the planting beds to your lawn space or sidewalk, and should, therefore, be lower than the back two layers. It’s also where you can keep things fresh and get your hands dirty throughout the year by changing out annuals as the seasons change. Or, if you want a lower-maintenance entrance, you can choose smaller perennials, evergreens or creeping ground covers.

The homeowner in this video (one of Doug’s past clients) chose the following plants to fill these three layers at their front entrance:

• Background: Boxwoods 
• Middle Ground: Lavender 
• Foreground: Verbena

Other Tips for Landscaping to Make a Grand Entrance | Front Yard Landscaping Ideas

Here are three other things you should keep in mind when making decisions about your front yard landscaping:

1. Your plants should be in keeping with the style of your home, and, in general, consistent with the look you’re going for. For instance, if you have a craftsman home, you should probably skip palm trees or any other tropical-looking plants. Or, if your home is modern or more minimalist, you shouldn’t have an overabundance of different plant material.
2. Make sure the views of your front door from the street aren’t obstructed by plant material. Likewise, nor should your guests have to maneuver around plants as they make their way down the sidewalk. Neither are convenient or welcoming, so you’ll either need to keep pruning your plants to size, or simply choose plants that won’t overgrow their space without a ton of pruning.
3. To make your entrance “the star” it should be, the plant material in the rest of your front yard shouldn’t be too distracting, but, rather, should frame the intended views. Again, your goal should be to draw eyes center and to the front door.

For more landscaping tips, check out Doug’s original Layer Up video.