On a residential area, a front yard (United States, Canada, Australia) or front garden (United Kingdom, Europe) is the portion of land between the street and the front of the house. [1] If it is covered in grass, it may be referred to as a front lawn. The area behind the house, usually more private, is the back yard or back garden. Yard and garden share an etymology and have overlapping meanings.
In North America, front yards, which normally include considerable driveway and parking space, tend to be mostly lawn even when large,[ citation needed ] but in Europe they are often treated as a flower garden and may be heavily planted.[ citation needed ] In North American suburbia, there may be no physical barriers marking the front and sides of the plot, which would be very unusual in Europe,[ citation needed ] where there are generally walls, fences or hedges on three sides of the garden.[ citation needed ]
While the front yard's counterpart, the backyard, is often dominated by utilitarian features like vegetable gardens, tool sheds, and clothes lines, the front yard is often a combination decorative feature and recreation area. [2] It is more commonly landscaped for display and is the usual place for display elements such as garden gnomes, [3] plastic flamingos, [4] [5] and yard shrines such as "bathtub Madonnas". [6] An article on London suburbs describes a "model" front garden in Kenton: "The grass ... is neatly mown. There is a flowering cherry and a privet hedge, behind which lurks a plaster gnome." [7]
Depending on climate, local planning regulations or size, a front yard may feature a lawn or grassed area, a driveway or footpath or both and gardens or a vegetable patch or potted plants.
The history of the Australian front yard is said to have begun with a regulation enacted in New South Wales in 1829 mandating that new houses be built at least 14 ft (4.3 m) from the street to ensure adequate space in front of each house for a garden. [8]
By the early 1900s, the front yard had become an accepted, "buffer between the private home and the public street". Australians adopted the American ideal of front yards without fences to create "park-like" streets and suburb-wide efforts were undertaken to remove fences and thereby encourage good neighbourly relationships and discourage anti-social behaviour and crime. [9] Daceyville in Sydney was the first suburb where fencing was systematically removed and soon public housing organisations in other states followed the trend. Some even encouraged front yard beautification by running competitions with cash prizes. [9]
During the construction of Australia's planned capital, Canberra, (in the late 1920s) the Federal Capital Commission provided government subsidies to encourage new residents to regularly maintain their front yards. [9]
By the 1950s, there was a clear delineation between front and back yards. [9] There was also, by then, a very clear street-view approach to garden design with the house façade and front yard considered in unison; to "view the whole effect from the street". [10]
The development and history of Canadian front yards generally followed early American trends but diverged in the early 1900s.
In the 1920s and 30s, zoning laws were introduced for growing cities like Ottawa and Vancouver. The regulations stipulated minimum front yard "depth" for new houses and ensured home builders shunned the "tenement house evil" of New York City and London. [11]
In many parts of Canada, lower average temperatures and a more pronounced want for privacy led to the increased popularity of tall trees at the side borders of housing blocks, framing the house and front yard. These provided wind breaks in winter and shade in the summer. [12] Lawn ornaments were less common in pre and post-war Canada than in the United States and a large well-kept tract of "featureless" lawn was popular with many middle-class Canadians. [12]
In the post-war era, suburban Canada gained its own distinctive architectural styles and this extended to front yards and gardens. Rather than the stark white façades of stately American houses, wealthy Canadians of the 60s and 70s showed a preference for wood, in particular "diagonal cedar panelling". To match that trend, front yards of such houses were often paved to match the entrances of modern city buildings; "no elite home of the 1970s was complete without a front yard of interlocking brick". [13]
As in other cultures, Canadian front yards became areas of socialisation between the public street and the private home; a space for street parties, family barbecues and neighbourly conversation. [12]
In many parts of Europe, the space in question is referred to as a front garden.
The earliest form of front garden was the open courtyard popular with Spanish and Italian nobility. As housing evolved, so too did gardens and façades. Enclosed courtyards were surpassed in popularity by the large manicured gardens of French, German and Dutch palaces and stately homes. These traditions were carried by the Europeans to the Americas where courtyards remained popular among Spanish settlers in Florida while productive cottage gardens became commonplace among Dutch settlers and English pilgrims in Massachusetts. [14]
As suburbs developed around major European cities, the attitude to privacy, and by extension to front gardens, was decidedly different from that of the British. As one Dutch commentator highlighted (in the 1950s): [15]
The Dutch language has no word that expresses the English concept of 'privacy': the right to be alone. It is not without reason that the English language has such a word and ours has not. It is a difference rooted in national character, and it can also be recognised in other places. We have low fences around almost every garden and yard, for example, but the English like high walls and hedges around their gardens, lest passers-by can look inside.
In older cities and townships (with houses built several centuries earlier) front gardens are far less common, with front doors providing residents with access direct to the street. In these cases, planter boxes and micro-gardens have become popular as a way of "greening" façades that would otherwise be without plants; elements that make a, "significant contribution to the quality of the environment". [16]
In British English, the space in question is referred to as a front garden.
Urban housing in the United Kingdom originally had no separation between the house front and the street. The introduction of the byelaw terraced house, a type of dwelling built to comply with the Public Health Act 1875, raised the standards of accommodation. The provision of a front garden in new houses became common practice during the second half of the 19th century as part of the Domestic Revival style within Victorian architecture: "to provide for the majority of new, even fairly modest, houses, a small front garden or paved forecourt, and a garden or yard at the back". [17] [18] Front gardens were "commonplace" for new residences by the 1870s. [19] The front garden was "largely ornamental" and initially more important than the back, which was sometimes eliminated to allow more space for service areas. [20] A fairly standard layout was adopted with a stone or brick wall to emulate the "grandeur of approach and walled privacy of large houses" and a straight path from the gate to the front door. [17] Often, the cottage garden style of thick planting of mixed types of flowers was adopted. This supposedly originated in the gardens of rural cottages, where front gardens had long been common. In the houses of the working class, the small rear garden was often more functional, as a space for drying clothes, having children play and the like, and any efforts at ornamental gardening took place in the front garden.
Early in the 20th century, housing developments influenced by the garden city movement, initiated by Ebenezer Howard in 1898, featured detached houses with undivided "communal grass areas" in front of them. [21] In essence, the houses shared a front garden.
However, outside these developments the dominant form of new housing in the United Kingdom until after World War II, especially in London, was the semi-detached, which superseded the previous dominant terraced house and where a garden was part of the ideal. [22] The front garden, smaller than the back, was separated from the street by a lower wall than in the Victorian house; some developers planted hedges and provided instructions on their care. [23] Gardening was a widely shared hobby and source of pride; developers sometimes prepared the front garden (almost never the back) as an inducement to buy, and sometimes held contests for the best front garden. [24] However, since the houses were not always provided with garages, as motor vehicles became more common, the front garden was increasingly often used as a car parking area or enclosed by a garage. [21]
During the Great Depression, local authorities encouraged families to grow produce in their own front gardens, thereby increasing community food supplies. Gardening was introduced in some schools, and towns introduced competitions and awards for attractive and productive front gardens. [25] (See Dig for victory.)
In the post-war era of the 1950s and 60s, many of those front garden areas used for parking were paved over and became mini-driveways. This trend also became more common as professional gardeners became less common, thus increasing the need for home owners to maintain what was often a very small section of lawn or planted garden. [26]
As residential areas were subdivided and developed during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the "suburban ideal" demanded large front yards, "dominated" by the facades of the houses they bounded. [2]
The size of new front yards gradually decreased during the second half of the 20th century as houses were built closer and closer to the front of housing blocks. [2]
In the 1870s, lawn ornaments became a popular front yard feature, with wrought iron sculpture, bird baths and gazebos being particularly popular. Throughout the 1880s and 90s, wicker lawn furniture became popular before being replaced in the early 1900s by nursery rhyme character and animal ornaments. [27] In the post-war period, kitsch ornaments including plastic flamingoes and garden gnomes became popular.
During the 1930s a new American Style took hold, inspired by the architectural designs of Frank Lloyd Wright, Bernard Maybeck and Greene and Greene; "informality, naturalness, interlocking indoor-outdoor design, greatly reduced flower-beds, privacy for outdoor recreation and leisure...". [28]
Local ordinances determine what owners and residents can and cannot do in their front yards. In recent times, sustainability enthusiasts and practitioners have attempted to use their front yards to grow organic produce, in violation of existing codes. In Orlando, Florida, for example, city codes set standards for front yard ground covering and prescribe lawns only. Residents there have received citations for breaching the code by growing vegetable gardens and are currently fighting to have the ordinances amended. [29] The illegality of growing vegetables in the front yard first received public attention due to the Oak Park incident [30] in 2011. The "Urban Farming Guidebook — Planning for the Business of Growing Food in BC's Towns & Cities" [31] provides an explanation to this recurring phenomenon "The Garden City model embraced food production and its systems as key elements of community design. However, the race to the single use zoned suburbs did not include food production as part of the design of suburbs....urban farming was excluded from our lists of permitted uses and such farming became non-conforming or simply illegal uses which, if they were lucky, avoided bylaw attention".
Since the early 2000s, once-common front yard "accoutrements" (like basketball rings on garages) are becoming less common; many are now prohibited by local government ordinances. [2]
Gardening is the process of growing plants for their vegetables, fruits, flowers, herbs, and appearances within a designated space. Gardens fulfill a wide assortment of purposes including but not limited to production of aesthetically pleasing areas, medicines, cosmetics, dyes, foods, wildlife habitats, and saleable goods(see market gardening). In addition, gardening may be practiced for its therapeutic, health, educational, cultural, philosophical, environmental, and religious benefits.
Georgian architecture is the name given in most English-speaking countries to the set of architectural styles current between 1714 and 1830. It is named after the first four British monarchs of the House of Hanover, George I, George II, George III, and George IV, who reigned in continuous succession from August 1714 to June 1830.
A courtyard or court is a circumscribed area, often surrounded by a building or complex, that is open to the sky.
A road verge is a strip of groundcover consisting of grass or garden plants, and sometimes also shrubs and trees, located between a roadway and a sidewalk. Verges are known by dozens of other names such as grass strip, nature strip or curb strip, the usage of which is often quite regional.
An apartment, flat, or unit is a self-contained housing unit that occupies part of a building, generally on a single storey. There are many names for these overall buildings. The housing tenure of apartments also varies considerably, from large-scale public housing, to owner occupancy within what is legally a condominium, to tenants renting from a private landlord.
A lawn is an area of soil-covered land planted with grasses and other durable plants such as clover which are maintained at a short height with a lawn mower and used for aesthetic and recreational purposes—it is also commonly referred to as part of a garden. Lawns are usually composed only of grass species, subject to weed and pest control, maintained in a green color, and are regularly mowed to ensure an acceptable length. Lawns are used around houses, apartments, commercial buildings and offices. Many city parks also have large lawn areas. In recreational contexts, the specialised names turf, pitch, field or green may be used, depending on the sport and the continent.
A parterre is a part of a formal garden constructed on a level substrate, consisting of symmetrical patterns, made up by plant beds, plats, low hedges or coloured gravels, which are separated and connected by paths. Typically it was the part of the garden nearest the house, perhaps after a terrace. The view of a parterre from inside the house, especially from the upper floors, was a major consideration in its design. The word "parterre" was and is used both for the whole part of the garden containing parterres and for each individual section between the "alleys".
A terrace, terraced house (UK), or townhouse (US) is a kind of medium-density housing that first started in 16th century Europe with a row of joined houses sharing side walls. In the United States and Canada these are sometimes known as row houses or row homes.
A tenement is a type of building shared by multiple dwellings, typically with flats or apartments on each floor and with shared entrance stairway access. They are common on the British Isles, particularly in Scotland. In the medieval Old Town, in Edinburgh, tenements were developed with each apartment treated as a separate house, built on top of each other. Over hundreds of years, custom grew to become law concerning maintenance and repairs, as first formally discussed in Stair's 1681 writings on Scots property law. In Scotland, these are now governed by the Tenements Act, which replaced the old Law of the Tenement and created a new system of common ownership and procedures concerning repairs and maintenance of tenements. Tenements with one or two room flats provided popular rented accommodation for workers, but in some inner-city areas, overcrowding and maintenance problems led to shanty towns, which have been cleared and redeveloped. In more affluent areas, tenement flats form spacious privately owned houses, some with up to six bedrooms, which continue to be desirable properties.
Garden design is the art and process of designing and creating plans for layout and planting of gardens and landscapes. Garden design may be done by the garden owner themselves, or by professionals of varying levels of experience and expertise. Most professional garden designers have some training in horticulture and the principles of design. Some are also landscape architects, a more formal level of training that usually requires an advanced degree and often a state license. Amateur gardeners may also attain a high level of experience from extensive hours working in their own gardens, through casual study, serious study in Master gardener programs, or by joining gardening clubs.
A backyard, or back yard, is a yard at the back of a house, common in suburban developments in the Western world.
A single-family detached home, also called a single-detached dwelling,single-family residence (SFR) or separate house is a free-standing residential building. It is defined in opposition to a multi-family residential dwelling.
Pink plastic flamingos are a common lawn ornament in the United States.
In land use, a setback is the minimum distance which a building or other structure must be set back from a street or road, a river or other stream, a shore or flood plain, or any other place which is deemed to need protection. Depending on the jurisdiction, other things like fences, landscaping, septic tanks, and various potential hazards or nuisances might be regulated and prohibited by setback lines. Setbacks along state, provincial, or federal highways may also be set in the laws of the state or province, or the federal government. Local governments create setbacks through ordinances, zoning restrictions, and Building Codes, usually for reasons of public policy such as safety, privacy, and environmental protection. Neighborhood developers may create setback lines to ensure uniform appearance in the neighborhood and prevent houses from crowding adjacent structures or streets. In some cases, building ahead of a setback line may be permitted through special approval.
A garden ornament or lawn ornament is a non-plant item used for garden, landscape, and park enhancement and decoration.
Natural landscaping, also called native gardening, is the use of native plants including trees, shrubs, groundcover, and grasses which are local to the geographic area of the garden.
Multifamily residential is a classification of housing where multiple separate housing units for residential inhabitants are contained within one building or several buildings within one complex. Units can be next to each other, or stacked on top of each other. Common forms include apartment building and condominium, where typically the units are owned individually rather than leased from a single building owner. Many intentional communities incorporate multifamily residences, such as in cohousing projects.
The traditional kitchen garden, vegetable garden, also known as a potager or in Scotland a kailyaird, is a space separate from the rest of the residential garden – the ornamental plants and lawn areas. It is used for growing edible plants and often some medicinal plants, especially historically. The plants are grown for domestic use; though some seasonal surpluses are given away or sold, a commercial operation growing a variety of vegetables is more commonly termed a market garden. The kitchen garden is different not only in its history, but also its functional design. It differs from an allotment in that a kitchen garden is on private land attached or very close to the dwelling. It is regarded as essential that the kitchen garden could be quickly accessed by the cook.
The bay-and-gable is a distinct residential architectural style that is ubiquitous in the older portions of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The most prominent feature of the style is a large bay window that usually covers more than half the front façade of the home, surmounted by a gable roof. The bay window typically extends from the ground level towards the roof, although a variant of the housing form exists where the bay window fronts only the first level; known as a half-bay-and-gable. The housing form may be built as a stand-alone structure, although it is more often built as a semi-detached, or as terraced houses.
In the Western history of gardening, from the 16th to early 19th centuries, a wilderness was a highly artificial and formalized type of woodland, forming a section of a large garden. Though examples varied greatly, a typical English style was a number of geometrically-arranged compartments closed round by hedges, each compartment planted inside with relatively small trees. Between the compartments there were wide walkways or "alleys", usually of grass, sometimes of gravel. The wilderness provided shade in hot weather, and relative privacy. Though often said by garden writers at the time to be intended for meditation and reading, the wilderness was much used for walking, and often flirtation. There were few if any flowers, but there might be statues, and some seating, especially in garden rooms or salle vertes, clearings left empty. Some had other features, such as a garden maze.