Photo Credit: Anna Guerrero via www.pexels.com

Give your home kerb appeal. Make your front garden as appealing as the back garden, so passers-by can enjoy a beautiful house that you are proud of.

Path and front door

Visually your garden path should be welcoming and make the journey from the street to your front door simple. If your path is narrow, don’t hem it in by planting right up to its edges. Set any low-lying plants back from the edge of the path to maintain full width. Pathways are ideally around four feet wide so two people can walk side by side or carry bulky items. Maintain the space by keeping the pathway clear of weeds and brush and jet wash the surface regularly.

Maintaining your front door is a task that homeowners often neglect. Working from the top, use a microfibre cloth or duster to wipe down the door, looking out for cobwebs. Give your door a once over when cleaning. Clean the hinges and seals with WD40 if necessary. Check any wood to see if it needs revarnishing. Then, with a soft cloth, clean the door with washing-up liquid and warm water. Do not jet wash your front door! Use a window cleaner spray for any glazing.

Lighting

Garden lights can enhance your front garden when night falls. Although they have visual and atmospheric appeal, they also serve a purpose. For instance, flanking driveways with lights can help visitors park their cars. Low-level lights highlight steps that make your garden safer at night. You can define planting borders with ground lights to stop people trampling bedding plants.

Aesthetically, ground-level lights create a lit backdrop to garden features. They can produce dramatic silhouettes of trees, statues, plants, and other objects, highlighting their shape.

Solar lights are a great choice, not just for bringing a warm glow to your garden but also because you don’t need to plug them in. They are often on timers, too, so they can turn on automatically at dusk and switch off later in the night.

Plants

Approach your front garden planting as you would if you were buying furniture for your reception room. A colour theme will focus your mind, and decide if you want plants in pots, raised beds or just in the ground. Bedding plants add a splash of vivid colour and can be refreshed throughout the year. Another colourful and fragrant addition is climbing roses that grow up a trellis and work well in a cottage-style front garden.

Container trees can be used to frame a front door and can be moved around depending on the seasons. To define your borders from your neighbours or the street, low-lying laurel hedging is a durable evergreen that produces flowers and berries all year round. It can be grown in most soils.

Add colour

Not only can you add colour through foliage, but you can do so with your front door and the exterior walls of your house. While visually pleasing, painting your home’s exterior also keeps your home safe from weather damage and free from staining. Painting can even prevent exterior wood from rotting. Just choose the right time of year to paint the exterior of your home. Late spring through to early autumn gives the best chance of excellent drying conditions.