What Makes a Front Yard Beautiful?

I used to think a beautiful front yard meant manicured green grass with a small, well-defined garden providing a measured degree of colour. Certainly, this was the aesthetic growing up in my hometown of Ancaster, a Hamilton, Ontario, suburb near Toronto. Front yards were places to drop bicycles, occasionally pitch a political sign, or exchange pleasantries with neighbours before ducking inside the house. For the most part, however, they served as a kind of no-man's land where not much transpired. This outside antechamber acted as a buffer zone between the inner activity of the private home and the public arena of the sidewalk, street, and greater community. It was largely for show, not really a space for living.

Grass has been the default choice for front yards for decades. But is a decorative, idle grass lawn just the landscaping equivalent of Muzak? Bland and inoffensive. Photo by I Do Nothing But Love on Unsplash

Perhaps, what makes the space in front of the average suburban home meaningful is the role it plays in unifying the overall neighbourhood and creating conformity and compliance through either enforced or implied quality standards. The front yard is a manifestation of the agreement we make to live together as a community. Although privately owned, it is visually shared, making it part of everyone's streetscape.

Civil society to a large extent relies on conformity: upholding a set of democratic government rules. To achieve conformity, the City of Hamilton, like most other local North American governments, maintains a bylaw that requires homeowners to keep grass and weeds trimmed under a certain height. Furthermore, the Province of Ontario offers a lawn care guide on its Minstry of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Affairs website, citing mowing, watering, and fertilizing as optimal ways to keep a lawn healthy.

Looking at front yards in the United States, the aesthetic model is similar to Canada's. For example, Celebration, Florida, a utopian project developed by the Walt Disney Company and envisioned as an ideal American community*, features supposedly optimal design elements at all levels. The town's design guidelines inform residents that their "primary consideration is of the overall “streetscape” to which each property should contribute, with no single property dominating its appearance....(owners should) locate favorite pieces of decoration in the Private Zone (behind the home) which provides greater opportunity for personal enjoyment." In addition, lawns should be maintained to between three and four inches.

The ideal front yard aesthetic from Hamilton to Celebration and in suburban developments right across the continent were intended to maintain a semblance of order in communities, especially since the 1950s when these developments surged in numbers. Keep the front neat, tidy and free of vivacity. Live your life and express your personality out back, out of public sight. Stick to the government handbook and we all get along. 

However, human beings are wired to question conventions and buck trends, and their attitude toward front yards is no different. Upsetting conformity, even in a small gesture such as treating your front yard differently than your neighbours is, at its core, an act of dissidence. Furthermore, world events and technologies constantly alter how people live. Customs, like maintaining a cropped front lawn are hard to break and take some societal adjustments. It feels like an adjustment period is happening now with our use of the front yard.

This Dundas homeowner (ok, it's me) does not keep a pristine, weed-free front yard. What must the neighbours say?

When we first moved into our suburban Dundas home in 2008, our front yard was like most of the others on the street: a carpet of green grass with some small shrubs that hugged the brick facade. Within a couple of years, our front lawn was less than ideal, reflecting a bit of the chaos that was going on inside. Between work and managing two young kids, lawn maintenance was low on our priority list. We kept the grass trim with a motorless push mower but did not feel inspired to spend a lot of time pulling weeds nor did we believe in applying pesticides. The truth was, we wanted to be respectable neighbours but really didn't care if our lawn fit some suburban paradigm. Our feelings led to tearing up most of the grass and planting drought-resistant shrubs and ground cover. Easier for us and better for the environment. What could be wrong with that?

How "beautiful" does your front yard need to be? The aesthetic ideal of a cropped green lawn seems to be changing, but alternatives are wide-ranging and represent different interpretations of "beauty."

Well, what could go wrong is if you have a neighbour that does not ascribe to the same landscaping aesthetic. After all, what is beautiful is extremely personal. Some homeowners resist considerations of conventional "beauty" altogether, yielding their yard over to nature to have its way and allowing weeds and all manner of flora to grow wild. One gardener in our area uses their yard in a completely functional way, having converted it to permaculture, or "permanent agriculture" that is sustainable and regenerative. The downside according to a few neighbours is that it looks cluttered and messy.

Just a few days ago, a CBC article described how one London, Ontario, woman returned home from vacation to find her pollinating garden, cultivated over two decades, had been mowed down by city workers after a neighbour complained.

This Dundas homeowner, a landscape designer, did away with grass but still wanted a pleasing aesthetic. They sourced native plants left over from jobs and made their own water feature out of a large rock. 

Plenty of homeowners in Dundas and elsewhere prefer the decorum of a grass lawn and appreciate the structure it gives the neighbourhood. I spoke to some neighbours who claim to actually enjoy mowing their lawns. They refer to achieving a zen-like meditative state by creating perfectly patterned lines and a delightful heady rush from the smell of freshly cropped grass.

Nevertheless, increasingly, there are signs to suggest the pristine, green weedless lawn is falling out of fashion. Even if some homeowners continue to prefer a grassy front yard, at the very least, alternative treatments are gaining in presence and acceptance.

For example, our next-door neighbour did not even complain when our milkweed plants drifted over to their side of the property line and started rooting themselves en masse. Milkweed is the sole diet of the monarch caterpillar and thus critical to the survival of the monarch butterfly. Once thought to be an invasive weed, milkweed today is welcomed by many gardeners who want to propagate the dwindling monarch population. In fact, a gentleman in his 60s who recently moved into the neighbourhood came knocking at our door asking to dig up some of the perennials for his own grass-free front yard. He did away with turf shortly after moving in, opting instead for rows and patterns of organized shrubs and perennials.

The perceived beauty of a grass lawn is imposed on and sold to us by various hegemonic structures. I mean, why is a yard comprised of pollinating flowers or edibles not accepted as "beautiful?"  As Michael Pollan argues in his 1989 essay, Why Mow? The Case Against Lawns, there is beauty in the act of gardening, which is "an infinitely variable process of invention and discovery" as opposed to the "totalitarianism" of lawns. "Gardening...tutors us in nature's ways, fostering an ethic of give and take with respect to the land. Gardens instruct us in the particularities of place." Surely there is beauty in working with and learning from the land rather than oppressing it and bending it to our will with chemicals and time better spent on more meaningful pursuits.

Since the summer of 2020, several of our neighbours have turned their front yards over to wildflowers, native shrubs and perennials, incorporated vegetable gardens, and more than a couple of households have added bird feeders and bird baths. Perhaps these changes are due to extra time spent at home over the pandemic and the need to find hobbies. Or maybe there has been a deeper appreciation for nature and wildlife given the grave scare the world underwent. Whatever the reasons, a beautiful front yard is taking different forms that move beyond an outdated but lingering grass lawn aesthetic.

* Celebration, Florida, despite its attempt to be a model U.S. town, has been widely criticized for its lack of diversity, even by Disney executives, according to an article in the New York Times.