Small Front Yard Gardens in Toronto’s Danforth District
Designing small front yard gardens poses interesting challenges, and a walk-about in Toronto’s Danforth district during a visit to my sister offered me a delightful glimpse into a charming neighbourhood where creativity abounds in transforming small plots of land into attractive garden spaces. When planning and renovating our own gardens for the growing season, it’s inspiring to look at images of other people’s gardens, to see how they handled issues we might also face – like gardening when all you have is a postage-stamp-sized front yard.
In the Danforth neighbourhood district, images of which are shown in the photo gallery below, there are many attractive smaller homes as well as larger character homes. In the area where I did my walk-about, the houses were primarily two storey homes on narrow lots, with many constructed in the post-World War II era as side-by-sides. For these types of homes, front yards are shared, which makes gardening to suit one’s own style an even more interesting prospect.
I was impressed, walking through the area near to Riverdale Park and south of Bloor Street East and east of Broadview Avenue, with the creativity and care paid to gardening in these small front yards. We saw a lovely assortment of plantings, interesting works of art, attractive small trees, and charming paint selections on houses and doors. The type of sights, sounds, and smells I encountered made me think that the neighbourhood folks, well diversified though this community is, were walking about in their birkenstock sandals and had perhaps intentionally congregated in this charming little section of the big city, across the Don River from Toronto’s downtown business district.
The photo gallery, below, features images that I took during this neighbourhood walk-about – photographs of lush vines clinging to brick siding and climbing up walls, beautiful and unusual small trees, shrub roses hugging the edges along an old sidewalk, mixed tall grasses drawing the eye to the heart of shared yard, vigorous groundcovers weaving around taller perennials, interesting rock gardens, and a host of great images that I have stored away in my mind’s eye as well as in my digital photograph albums. I hope this small gallery of photographs gives you a glimpse into life in a vibrant neighbourbood on the edge of downtown Toronto, and helps to fire up your imagination for dressing up a small front yard in your own urban setting.
Photographs: NK
Photo location: Toronto, Canada (2012)
Text: NK
Copyright: cookiebuxton.com
To view the gallery and enlarge the photographs, click on any image to enlarge. Then, click on the selected photo to advance to the next image.
