Landscaping Your Small Yard

Helen Brandt planted her first city garden when she was twelve. She owns Wintergarden, a propagation nursery and garden design consulting service.

A short ride around town will reveal that Bellingham is in the midst of “infilling.” What this usually means is the existing vegetation is removed, and is replaced with lawn grass, pavement and houses. The layout of many new developments follows the time-honored tradition of placing the house in the front-center of the lot.

This allows for a small front lawn, narrow side yards, and a backyard that is within view of the neighbors next door and behind. Samples of this plan can be seen at Orchard Estates, east of James, north of K-Mart, and in the Wildflower neighborhood west of the city’s green collection site at Lakeway and Woburn Streets.

In the newer cluster developments the side setbacks from the property line have been reduced to five feet. This means that the walls of the houses can be five feet from the lot line or 10 feet from the neighbor’s house or garage wall.

Orchard Estates is an example of a cluster development. The average lot size is 5000 square feet. Some are smaller, some larger. Lot dimensions are typically 45 to 50 feet wide and about 100 feet deep. When the two car garage, front entrance, and living room are completed, the remaining side yards are narrow.

As lot sizes shrink, the need for designing gardens for small spaces increases. The traditional plants featured in garden books soon overwhelm the small garden when they reach maturity. Examples of this are lilac bushes, Norway maples, Colorado spruce, and 10-foot-high rhododendrons.

New homes typically are surrounded by a grass lawn, with some shrubs planted along the foundation of the house. This provides the builder with a simple solution to the problem of selling a new home that would otherwise be surrounded by a sea of mud or bare earth.

What the new homeowner soon finds out is that keeping a lawn looking presentable entails a significant expenditure of time and money. An estimated $30 billion is spent on lawns every year. The downside of lawn maintenance has been adequately described elsewhere and will not be discussed here. Granted, then, lawns constitute labor-intensive landscaping.

One solution is to decide whether some grass is needed for a children’s play area. If it is, then the homeowner may consider making it the size needed for play equipment, sandbox, and no larger. A size 20 x 20 feet may be sufficient. With a lawn that size, a push mower can do the job, eliminating the need to keep gasoline in the garage and the need to buy an expensive power mower.

Some people enjoy looking at a soft green grass swath and want one just for that reason. Interestingly, the pleasure of looking at a lovely lawn can be satisfied just as easily with an oval 15 x 20 feet as by covering the entire lot with grass. A small central oval of grass can be formed by widening the planting beds along the foundation and creating a planting bed along the sidewalk and driveway.

If one shrinks or eliminates the lawn grass, the question is, what should one replace it with? A study some years back found that the least work is a design using small trees such as crabapple, Japanese maple, serviceberry, dogwood or redbud that are underplanted with low-growing shrubs such as dwarf azalea or rhododendron, leucothoe, mahonia nervosa, and evergreen ferns. The most time consuming and work intensive design is the traditional English perennial flower garden.

When we bought our current house, the shady half of our backyard had thin wisps of grass and stayed damp all summer. We removed the grass and planned to replace it with kinnikinnick and salal. But before the replacement plants had a chance to become larger, we discovered we already had a lovely groundcover—emerald green, soft, and gently undulating. Several varieties of moss had established themselves where the unhappy grass had been.

Moss needs no mowing, fertilizing, or herbicide applications. Occasional pulling of unwanted tree seedlings is all that it requires. Moss can be a perfect solution for that shady north side of the house. If you are in a hurry and want to hasten the natural process, you can transplant small clumps of moss from a friend’s yard or from the woods. They will soon spread. A few low-growing ferns such as deer fern or oak fern can complete the design.

Lawn grass has been criticized for being the reason why homeowners use excess fertilizer and herbicide that run into streams and lakes. However, ornamental grasses do not need pampering and can diminish the hard lines in today’s small yards.

Concrete sidewalks and driveways, stone retaining walls, and houses can effectively be softened by adding ornamental grass to your landscaping. And small yards will not be overwhelmed by mature clumps of smaller size grasses such as Miscan-thus sinensis ‘Yakushima Dwarf,” Japanese bloodgrass, or Red fox sedge.

Some varieties of ornamental grass can prevent rapid water runoff and erosion on sloping hillsides, while providing attractive textures and colors.

One approach to the increasingly small lot sizes is to join with one’s neighbors to develop a planting plan that includes the three to five yards adjoining your own yard. Each homeowner can enjoy the benefits of the joint plan. Such a project is described in the book by Sara Stein, “Noah’s Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our Own Backyards.” (Houghton Mifflin, 1993)

However, you can readily come up with your own version, uniquely suited to Bellingham’s climate and your neighborhood’s terrain. The basic principle is best shown in the drawing on the facing page.

The small trees are clustered at the adjoining corners of the four yards. Bird-friendly shrubs and ornamental grasses are planted beneath them and along the lot line. This creates a wildlife corridor through the backyards of the neighborhood. And each homeowner can enjoy watching the creatures that take up residence. Robins are fond of holly berries. Other plants that provide bird food are huckleberry, redtwig dogwood, ornamental grasses, and grains such as millet, rye and wheat.

Infilling need not result in a barren urban landscape. With some careful planning, even the smallest yards can enhance our neighborhoods. The accompanying lists include some plants that have done well in our Bellingham gardens.