Homeowners with limited free time prefer a simple and easy-care front garden design. This can be achieved with attractive alternatives to high-maintenance lawns and demanding perennials. Find out here how you can create an uncomplicated front garden with stones and plants.
How can I design my front yard easily?
You can create a simply designed front garden with gravel, stones and easy-care plants such as lavender, sedum or ornamental grasses. Alternatively, you can rely on natural stone slabs, flower pots or ground-covering plants such as ivy or fat man to suppress weeds.
Sparkling and decorative – composition of gravel and plants
Give gravel-covered areas floral life with easy-care plants. Under the special conditions of an inorganic mulch layer, special species and varieties come into focus. We have put together recommended trees, grasses and perennials for you here:
- As leading figures: ball trumpet tree 'Nana' (Catalpa bignoides) or buddleia (Buddleja davidii)
- Robust subshrubs: Lavender (Lavendula angustifolia) or Perovskie (Perovskia x superba)
- Undemanding perennials: stonecrop (Sedum x telephium), pearl basket (Anaphalis) or speedwell (Veronica)
Are you toying with an uncomplicated front garden that is almost self-sustaining? Then you are well advised to use ornamental grasses in the gravel bed. Apart from annual pruning and watering when it is dry, grasses are only noticeable because of their delicate beauty. Recommended species are the mushroom head sedge 'The Beatles' (Carex caryophyllea), bearskin grass (Festuca gautieri) and the wonderful snow marbel (Luzula nivea) with white spiked flowers from June to August.
Natural stone slabs and flower pots – elegant design without fanfare
With a little aesthetic flair, natural stone slabs and flower pots can be used to create a front garden design worth seeing. The wide range of stone types offers beautiful paving stones and slabs for every budget, from inexpensive limestone to high-quality granite. Shapely polygonal slabs made from rubble stones of various types, such as porphyry, gneiss, bas alt, or quartzite, are in vogue.
The specialist retailer has stone pots (€59.00 on Amazon) available for you to match the natural stone flooring, which can be showcased with year-round or seasonal planting, tailored to the architecture of your house. As an example for the front garden of a Tuscan house, we have put together the following planting plan for a Mediterranean treasure chest for you:
- Wood milkweed (Euphorbia myrsinites)
- Spanish daisy (Erigeron karvinskianus)
- Ornamental grass blue fescue (Festuca cinerea)
- Dwarf Iris in red and purple (Iris Barbata-Nana)
- Lavender (Lavandula angustifolia)
The leading plant can be either magnificent Junker lilies (Asphodeline lutea) or majestic torch lilies (Kniphoa uvaria).
Tip
Ground covers are a nature-loving alternative to stones and gravel for effortless front garden design. Thanks to dense, creeping growth, the plants reliably suppress annoying weeds. Prime examples of easy-to-care ground cover plants are evergreen ivy (Hedera helix) and fat man (Pachysandra terminalis).