My front yard garden – the view from the street. The beginning of our second year in the house.
Two things happened in the past few weeks that led me to start thinking differently about our house and yard.
#1: When chatting with my neighbor as he was weeding his front yard garden he said, “You guys have a country lot. You have a lot going on around your house – piles of wood, gardens, projects.”
#2: An old coworker was in our neighborhood and drove by our house to check out our gardens. She said, “I love your garden, but that style would never fly in the neighborhood where I live. My neighborhood is too formal.”
These two conversations converged and I started to wonder – do we have a country lot in the city?
Our garden about a year after the first photo in this post. I painted the house and we’ve grown our gardens.
I grew up in a very urban area and I consider myself a city person. I love Madison for its mix of vibrant city and natural greenery, and have lived within its boundaries the entire 13 years I’ve been in Wisconsin.
When we were looking for a new house over two years ago, we wanted to move from our suburban feeling neighborhood closer to the city core. We wanted to live in a walkable and bikeable neighborhood with amenities such as cafes, restaurants, hardware stores, and a library.
But, we also wanted a big lot so we could have large gardens and plenty of space to spread out. We set a minimum lot size and an ideal lot size, knowing that we’d have to skirt the balance between a dense neighborhood and yard space.
In Madison, most of the neighborhoods close to the city center have smaller lot sizes. Our minimum lot size was 7,000 and our ideal was 10,000 (with lots of sun). When house listings came up on my computer the lot size was the first thing I looked at. If it was under our minimum, I immediately deleted it.
The house we eventually bought exceeded our ideal lot size by 3,000 square feet! Although we do have some big trees (lots of fun for my arborist husband) that keep half of our yard in shade.
In the two years we’ve transformed parts of our yard from an overgrown mess to huge food gardens. It’s exactly what we envisioned for our new house and it’s been a blast to bring it into being.
But, the comments from the past few weeks gave me pause. How does our neighborhood view our yard?
Another shot of the front yard garden from the front steps facing the street.
It’s very apparent that our house has a working yard. We grow food, we chop wood, we entertain friends for dinner and drinks, and we work on projects in the shade. My husband plants trees and shrubs, we get rid of grass and replace it with gardens, and we spread a lot of woodchips.
We keep telling ourselves that it’s a work in progress. “We’ve only lived here for two years!” we exclaim to each other when we feel guilty about our sometimes messy yard.
It’s definitely nowhere near the “perfect” American yard you see in TV commercials and magazines. We have weeds, piles of wood waiting to be chopped for winter, and a deck that’s falling apart and needs to be ripped out this summer.
But, we’re building a yard that represents us and what’s important in our life: growing food, planting trees and flower gardens, and storing wood for the winter.
So, in reflecting upon my yard this past week I’ve come full circle from embarrassment about its imperfections to pleasure in all that we’ve done. It doesn’t really matter what other people think of my yard – if I love it and revel in its imperfect beauty that’s all that really matters. Right?
See how it all came together in these posts about how we built the garden:
Building the Front Yard Garden – Part 2
Expanding the Front Yard Garden
Adding More Garden! Our Side Yard Transformation
