What To Plant In Your Front Yard In Every Zone Across The United States

You may want to keep your grass and simply add native plants and flowers to attract pollinators. (Here are 5 things you’re doing every day that hurt honeybees.) You can remove plants that don’t belong and reshape your garden to reflect a commitment to native species.

You could also rip out most of the grass and use Vogt’s method of making a grass border as a good compromise between your goals and keeping the neighbors happy. “For the conservation-minded homeowner, this might be a desirable landscaping goal,” says Wendi Mulvey, an environmental educator at the Cora Hartshorn Arboretum in Short Hills, NJ. “Not everyone has neighbors who will appreciate a huge feral meadow right next door.”

The Arboretum planted their entire front garden with “native plant species that offer food and shelter to a huge variety of birdsbutterflies, and other living things,” says Mulvey. “We attempt to maintain the Arboretum as a haven for wildlife, and continuously edit out invasive and non-native species.” That’s a difficult balance to strike, but careful planning makes the goal attainable.

 

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