Adding food plants to the front yard can ruffle the feathers of lawn-loving neighbors, but when the garden is as ornamental as Rebecca’s, it will become a point of pride for the community.
If you’re planning on growing food in the front yard, why not make the landscaping visually pleasing while you’re at it? Rebecca Sweet’s stunning front-yard garden shows you how. At the heart of her garden, a curved flagstone pathway meanders through three triangular beds that are surrounded by an extensive collection of edible and ornamental plants including ‘Kaleidoscope’ abelias, oakleaf hydrangeas, ‘Hidcote’ lavenders, and ‘Sunshine Blue’ blueberries.
Garden designer and writer Rebecca Sweet enjoys creating gardens — often front-yard landscapes — in her signature “California fusion” style that blends the personal goals of her clients with regionally appropriate, often native plants. “The result is a garden that is layered, lush, and environmentally friendly,” says Rebecca.
Rebecca’s design for a front-yard garden is highly productive — supplying a selection of fresh herbs, vegetables, and fruits 12 months of the year — but it is also beautiful. It includes ornamental shrubs, perennials, and grasses for additional interest, texture, and color. “This year-round garden was designed to be enjoyed by the homeowners as well as the neighbors,” says Rebecca. “It consists of colorful low-water, low-maintenance, and evergreen shrubs and perennials, as well as well-behaved edibles.” Her high-performance food plants include evergreen herbs like creeping thyme, sage, and rosemary, plus long-performing blueberries and citrus plants.
Adding food plants to the front yard can ruffle the feathers of lawn-loving neighbors, but when the garden is as ornamental as Rebecca’s, it will become a point of pride for the community.
The appeal of berms. Unlike traditional vegetable gardens planted in straight rows or raised beds, Rebecca’s garden boasts a slight berm along the front, which adds to its ornamental appearance. A berm, which is much less expensive than a retaining wall, is constructed from one or more low mounds of soil. If these are formed into slightly undulating hills, they will blend in naturally with the surrounding garden. “Subtle berms surround the vegetable beds to add much-needed height variation in this small, flat garden, but also to remedy the problem of our naturally occurring, poor-draining clay soil,” she says.
Stepping stones lead the way through the decorative pea gravel, which Rebecca uses as a water-conserving, weed-suppressing mulch that will also reflect the summer’s heat back to the edibles. To soften the gravel and stones, she has added low-growing creeping thyme, dwarf grasses, and native salvias.
A berm is essentially just a mound of earth with sloped sides built to add privacy, filter noise, separate different areas of a garden, screen undesirable views, create a windbreak, or provide additional planting areas. Taller than a raised bed, a berm is often 18 to 24 inches higher than the surrounding ground. In her plan, Rebecca uses a low berm to collect rainwater and provide visual interest to the garden. Though a large berm will require a significant amount of soil, the volume of soil needed can be reduced by using fill like branches, logs, brush, gravel, or stones as an inner layer of the berm. Generally, berms should be curved and made slightly asymmetrical for a more attractive and natural-looking shape that will blend better into the landscape.
A chorus of diverse plants. While the berms set the stage, the garden headliners are the plants — artichokes with spiky silvery green foliage, compact but productive blueberry shrubs, and a trio of pineapple guava. Backup harmony is provided by carefully selected ornamentals — ‘Kaleidoscope’ abelia (an evergreen shrub with an ever-changing color show), the four-season oakleaf hydrangea, and the deep purply red foliage of ‘Plum Passion’ heavenly bamboo. Rebecca praises the performance of the three blueberry bushes. “In addition to offering tasty fruit in the summer, many varieties have beautiful hues of red, peach, and orange in their fall foliage, adding another level of interest to the border,” she says. Plus in a mild climate many blueberries are semi-evergreen, making them ideal for long-lasting beauty.
A tidy appearance. When choosing edibles for a front-yard garden, Rebecca recommends giving a little more thought to appearances. “While the neighbors may appreciate the shared bounty of your garden, they won’t appreciate an overgrown and messy-looking vegetable garden,” she says. She recommends bypassing rambunctious sprawlers such as indeterminate tomatoes, zucchini, and pumpkin vines and instead planting well-mannered compact varieties of vegetables. If you must have tomatoes, choose varieties advertised for growing in containers, such as ‘Micro Tom’ or ‘Patio.’
Drought-tolerant choices. Gardening in an arid region like California also requires seeking out drought-tolerant edibles. “While most edibles require ample amounts of water, there are some that can thrive on less, such as rosemary, thyme, sage, many varieties of citrus, pineapple guava, figs, and persimmons,” says Rebecca. In warm climates, Rebecca recommends pineapple guava (Feijoa sellowiana) as a possible alternative for a small tree. “It’s evergreen (perfect for screening!) but also thrives in both full sun or partial shade, making it perfect for many areas of the garden,” she says. Other outstanding characteristics include its showy red-and-white flowers that are followed by “deliciously sweet fruit!”
Irreplaceable rosemary. Rebecca feels that no Californian garden would be complete without some rosemary plants. “They provide year-round beauty (flowering in late winter with blooms of blue or white) and are delicious in many common dishes,” she notes, adding that with sizes ranging from low-growing, sprawling groundcovers to towering 5-foot specimens, there is a rosemary plant perfect for any spot in your garden.
1. ‘Honey Melon’ dwarf pineapple sage (3)
2. ‘Sunshine Blue’ blueberries (3)
3. ‘Wonderful’ pomegranate (1)
4. Dwarf Meyer lemons (3)
5. Pineapple guavas (3, trained as standards)
6. ‘Purpurascens’ garden sage (3)
7. ‘Morello’ or ‘Montmorency’ sour cherry tree (1)
8. ‘Gilt Edge’ silverberries (2)
9. Artichokes (2)
10. ‘O’Neal’ blueberries (4)
11. Borage (3)
12. Dwarf Bearss lime tree (1)
13. Lemon or ‘Lime’ thyme (6)
14. ‘Howard McMinn’ manzanitas (5)
15. Reed grasses (2)
16. ‘Pink Splendor’ mirror plants (3)
17. Berkeley sedges (4)
18. ‘Snow Queen’ or ‘Alice’ oakleaf hydrangeas (2)
19. ‘Breeze’ dwarf mat rush (lomandra, 7)
20. ‘Bloodgood’ Japanese maple
21. ‘Newellii’ cestrum
22. ‘Nuevo Leon’ autumn sage (3)
23. ‘Matrona’ sedum (2)
24. ‘Hidcote’ or ‘Munstead’ lavenders (3)