Learning a few tricks of the trade will enable your Front yard to be streets ahead of your whole neighborhood. It's not as hard as you think to create a great looking Front Garden.
The real key to having a stunning Front yard is to first and foremost, make it look like a Garden. Even if it needs to be functional with a drive and access to a garage or path to your Front door, these should be secondary to your Front yard being a beautiful Garden.
How to Plan Your Front Yard
The way to achieve this is to think about how you would want your Garden to look if it didn't need to be functional. So, if you have a drive or a path to consider, just imagine how you would landscape your yard if those weren't needed. By taking away the functional, practical aspect and just allowing yourself to be creative, you will come up with a much better Design than if you concentrated on the functional first.
Once you have in your mind your ideal Garden, see how you can get it to look like that but with the incorporation your drive and your path etc. You'll find tackling it this way round will make a tremendous difference to how it looks.
Choose Your Shape Carefully
Try using shapes that will make the most use of the space you have available. Curves and circles, for example, are very good at making areas look bigger, as well as softening the lines of the house.
Getting the shape right in the Design process, before you even consider putting any plants or features in, will ensure you a greater degree of success than if you just concentrate on plants alone. Plants obviously are very important to any Garden but unless the shape is right to begin with, they will never really do it justice.
Another key thing to think about is which is your most important viewpoint? Do you want the Garden to look the best as you approach the house from the road, or do you want your view out of the window to look the best? Once you know the answer to that question, this will then help you guide your Design in the best way.
It's important to put your ideas down on paper before you start to build anything. It's much easier to change things on paper than it is on the ground, and considerably less expensive!