Talk:Front yard

Improving this article

(I was asked to take a look at this, and will be adding at least a couple of references.) I think the article improvement with distinct sections on different places (and pictures from different places) is on the right track, but a somewhat longer general section at the start appears to be needed to present the idea of contrast with the back yard/garden (seems to vary from place to place but even where front yards are not enclosed, back yards almost always are, if only by bushes, and tall "privacy fences" are almost unknown in front yards but common in back gardens; also the back yard has traditionally been the main location for children's play and for vegetable gardening) and to talk about lawn ornaments, which at present slip into the article in two of the geographic sections. In particular lawn flamingos are an almost entirely front yard display, and garden gnomes are more commonly used there too. And we should perhaps mention shrines to the Virgin Mary, which are an important phenomenon in the US.

The other American ideal of the white picket fence needs to be covered. Probably the "cottage garden" associated with Britain, too. The former is a for-show reference to the latter, if I can find a ref to back up that statement :-) Less importantly, on the British side of the Atlantic, crazy paving and rock gardens represent aesthetic fashions in front gardens that are presumably written about somewhere; the lawn and the herbaceous border/rose bushes are not the only model people follow.

It's not entirely correct to represent the history in the 20th century as one of shrinking front yards; it depends on location, kind of housing, and what one takes as the benchline. In the US, where (outside the urban core) attached housing was formerly built largely as a cost-saving measure, to provide "affordable housing" for those of low means, the proliferation of new developments of attached "townhouses" in recent years has certainly meant the average new front yard is smaller; those come with very small, enclosed front yards. However, just as the US also had brownstones and apartment buildings at the start of the 20th century, the UK had both Victorian villas and huge amounts of terraced housing, and the terraces started off with strict, legally mandated maintenance of a flat street line, such that even boot-scrapers were recessed into the wall. It was when the terrace gave way to the semi-detached that cheaper houses in non-rural areas in the UK came to have front gardens, which were part of the mystique for the working people who were drawn to leave the inner-urban "slum" terraces to buy the new houses. The estate developers also typically imposed a uniform appearance at the street frontage with walls and hedges. The personalization and effort to compete with neighbors in putting on an impressive show can be compared with the personalization of US tract houses in places like Levittown. But that huge boom in semis means the movement in the UK over the last century was more toward having front gardens than shrinking them, despite the movement in the 70s to pave over part or all to house the car - the size of the British front garden is more a function of the price range of the development or the particular street.

I'm glad to see the offshoot of the locavore movement calling for replacement of the front lawn with food plants is in the article - there's more news coverage of that than I'd expected. But is it exclusively a US thing? And the widespread phenomenon of local regulations, especially in suburbs, should probably come at the start of the article - there are not many places where letting the lawn grow tall or having "noxious weeds" in it is legal, although the laws are rarely enforced or vaguely worded in many places, and there's an important distinction between that and the regulations requiring a sweep of lawn and no fence or other barrier that are referred to in the US and Australia sections.

So there are some thoughts. Yngvadottir (talk) 20:16, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Wow, great stuff and lots to consider. A couple of quick responses - I couldn't find sources that discussed different regulations (in a comparative sense) from different countries and so I kept them in their respective sections. My impression was that if I summarised various regulations up the front, any comparison would end up being a bit WP:OR. But if there's anything out then I agree it would be better to make that part of the general section up the front.

The locavore movement isn't exclusively US, no, but that seems to be where there most recent disagreements have been. Very few places in Australia (for example) would have a similar restriction. Those who want to use their front yards for such a purpose would be reasonably free to do so and so any coverage of the movement wouldn't necessarily relate to front yards.

Anyway, I'm still looking for sources and if you have anything else to add, please go right ahead! Cheers, Stalwart111 22:15, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Enclosure

Worth pointing out that in the UK front gardens, even tiny ones, are almost always enclosed as a private space, unlike in the US, although pressure to create off-street parking has eroded this. Sometimes UK front gardens are bigger than back gardens, as in our property.Stub Mandrel (talk) 10:50, 11 November 2016 (UTC)