Ideas for a City Backyard

Work with your backyard space, not against it.nice backyard decoration image by starush from Fotolia.com

In city backyards, planning counts. City yards rarely have sprawling open spaces with uniform light. Instead, the urbanite often has to contend with a variety of obstacles such as small, irregularly shaped lots and high walls, casting heavy shadows. Work with your space rather than against it and your city yard will be a sanctuary from the cares of urban life.

Vertical Garden

Make use of walls to get the most out of your city backyard. Grow dense plantings of green vines such as ivy or the flowering species morning glories up trellises against your walls. Alternately, place rows of shelves on a west-facing wall to grow dense clusters of herbs, root vegetables or small flowers in planter boxes. If you want your yard to have a water feature, a wall is an ideal location. Mount a fountainhead up the wall so that water pours into a basin flush with the bottom.

With small lots and dense housing, city backyards often have privacy problems. If you'd like to keep your yard secluded without putting up a high fence, use bamboo as a privacy solution. Create miniature privacy screens by growing clumping bamboo in vases in front of the windows of neighboring buildings or in front of your own bathrooms. If you prefer to screen in a larger area of your yard, block off a rectangular patch with buried garden edging and plant spreading bamboo in it. The bamboo will spread to form a protective wall, creating a natural privacy screen with a more gentle look than a fence.

Give your backyard a hip, modern look with ecologically conscious, recycled materials. Make planters out of milk crates by placing a square of landscape fabric in the bottom and pressing sphagnum moss up against the sides. Fill the middle with potting soil and plant flowers, herbs and other small plants inside. Make a fountain out of a repurposed kitchen sink dripping into a basin. Make a bench out of two pairs of stacked milk or wine crates with a horizontal board across them on which to sit. Attach pieces of broken mirror or glass to a garden wall to create a shimmering effect in the sun.