Today we’re detailing the current state of the tiny garden in our Chicago front yard.
How We Got Here
Like many of our spaces, our Chicago front yard has seen a few iterations. What started as a patch of weedy grass became a formal little scenario with boxwoods, upright junipers and a small lawn. Then, back in the fall of 2021, we decided to let things get a little more wild. This is the view from our front porch, after completing the project in 2021:
And here it is today, in 2023!
Sleep, Creep, Leap
We subscribe to the sleep, creep, leap adage when it comes to planting and this garden was no different! Most of the plants were pretty static in 2021, grew at a restrained rate in 2022 and absolutely exploded this year! We love how the less-structured plantings provide layers, movement and interest against the clean lines of our homes’ structure and front porch.
Pollinator Friendly Plants
While not all of the plants we selected are specifically native to our area (although we came pretty close!), we definitely focused on pollinator friendly varieties to attract all the critters! The bees and butterflies absolutely love the Catmint, the Miss Kim and the Hydrangea, and we’re thrilled to have them. We can hear them buzzing from the front porch, and if you unfocus your eyes, it’s like looking at the stars – you notice more and more bees and butterflies!
A Fresh Use for an Existing Space
Much like the recent front yard landscaping project at our Michigan Tree House, the transformation of our Chicago front yard has brought new life to the space. We spend summer evenings on the porch or the down on the sidewalk listening to music and creating collaborative family chalk murals.
It may seem counter-intuitive, but in both the Tree House front yard and our Chicago home’s front yard, removing portions or all of our grass lawns has created more useful spaces. The idea of a big green lawn may seem like the best option to draw folks outside, but the loss of the lawns has been the thing that really brings us outdoors. We’re not anti-lawn at all! We’ve simply come to realize that – in the city – removing grass in favor or plants and trees is more our speed.
What’s your preference? Do you lean toward a big manicured lawn, a thoughtfully landscaped yard or somewhere in between?
PS: See our favorite lawn + gardening tools, our landscaping budget breakdown, and how we landscaped our Michigan home, too!
I’m definitely team landscape! The bees and hummingbirds love our lawn!
Wow, lovely! In my last condo I had a small back yard with cement patio and grass or dirt beds on all sides, ended up ripping up almost all grass left in a curved design and started a cottage garden adding plants at end of summer when almost a steal, alway perennials. My cottage garden was breathtaking and bloomed in three seasons! Everyone who walked by enjoyed it!
That sounds beautiful! And great tip on purchasing at the end of the season – we did that, too!
Looks so amazing! Q about the mini smoke bush — do you have a sense that is as tall as it will get/is it the type of plant one cuts down/back every year (like a hydrangea)?
We cut ours down this year, all the way to 6″ above the ground, and it grew back thicker and more bushy. Our plan is to do that every spring to keep it more dense, less leggy and it matures!
We are all about pollinators and other plants vs. a lawn. We also built a cool L-shaped garden bed in our front yard (which faces west). We live in California so there are incentives to remove your lawn because of all the water it uses.
Love that! Yes, location definitely should be taken into account when designing your yard.
While we still lived in California (we’re in Portugal now), we took out the small back lawn and put in flagstone, which gave us a huge entertaining area, and then we took out the front lawn and put in California natives, which was a huge game changer. All the bees (California has 1500 native species!), hummingbirds, and butterflies. It was a huge selling point when we put the house on the market – the fact that we’d gotten a habitat certification from the National Wildlife Federation helped with the bidding war. We still get updates via our former neighbor, who refers to the space as the “butterfly farm.”
That is INCREDIBLE! What an honor to receive the certification! Thank you so much for sharing, Carol.
I love all plants you added to your front lawn. It’s so great for pollinators and you don’t have to mow as much. I really hate how much lawn we have in front of our house.
I’d love to see an update on your back patio as well. I got so much inspiration from that project!
Thanks! We’ll see what we can do.
For a space as small as yours what you have done is perfect.
Thanks Vicki!