Front Yard Glow-Up Part 1: Why I’m Turning the Grass into a Native Pollinator Garden

My front yard at the end of a long winter is patchy crappy grass.

April 8, 2025

Since 2018, my husband and I have lived in a lovely old 1870 farmhouse in Lockport, NY. We are in love with our house, we have wonderful neighbors, and the huge, magnificent trees that line our street, although they rack nerves on the windiest days, provide grandiose shade and habitat for our suburban wildlife. In our neighborhood, front yards are not perfectly kept even on the grandest estates, but rather, maintained to a just-good-enough (and sometimes less) ideal. We’ve always fit right in, but I’m ready to bring some vibrancy to the block.

Some yards on our street contain neat little patches of annual bedding flowers tucked against walls and pathways, while others sport romantic wooden arbors covered in sprawling climbing roses or clematis vines. Our next door neighbor plants her tiny front yard with a mass of early spring crocus, daffodils and tulips. Our friends down the road pioneered their huge front yard into an edible garden, peas and beans unapologetically climbing up handmade trellises. Most yards burst into bright yellow abandon twice per year as the dandelion makes its debut — an event that, for me, only highlights the yards covered in Round-Up and Preen: perfectly green, chemical-laden, dandelion-less, and lacking soul.

For years, I’ve wanted to turn our patchy, grassy front yard into a beautiful flower garden. Every year, time has gotten the best of me. I grow a 1-acre flower farm 20 minutes north of our home, and that takes up the majority of my time and physical energy from April thru November every year. But if I’m ever going to actualize this dream of a beautiful pollinator cottage garden, I have to just do it, so 2025 is the year. As I always say: That thing isn’t going to plant itself.

Why I’m turning my front yard into a flower garden

Before starting anything new, I have a habit of asking myself why I want to do a new thing.

This is a habit I’ve learned from years of saying yes to too many things while running my business (and simultaneously running myself into the ground) and from reading books (Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less and Start With Why and F*ck No! How to Stop Saying Yes When You Can’t… are amazing books that have helped me reel in my persistent shiny object syndrome).

Asking why will always reveal whether the new thing is worth the effort or not, and it will reveal your true inner intentions.

Which leads me to another habit I have of asking myself before I start a new thing is, Am I doing this for my personal ego or is my intention for the greater good? Sure, I want my house to look better and I want to feel great when I walk through my colorful, floriferous front yard. At the same time, I don’t care to outshine my neighbors and have a “better” yard than them. I don’t care about attracting attention (and in fact, as a textbook introvert, I’d rather not attract attention, even though turning front yard grass into a garden typically does the opposite).

So, why? Why am I going to spend my free time away from my farm, starting yet another garden? I rattle that question around in my head and it sounds clinically insane. But I know something about myself. I do not do what I do (flower farming) to just grow flowers and make pretty things. I grow a flower farm using regenerative growing practices to help make the slice of the earth I steward just a little bit better. I write this blog, of which the #1 post that attracts over 1,000 visitors every single day is titled The Reasons Why Synthetic Fertilizers like Miracle-Gro are so Bad for your Garden because it’s important to me that other people stop using harmful chemicals in their yards. I wrote a book called Growing Gorgeous Dahlias: The Regenerative Grower’s Guide to Abundant Dahlias from Garden to Flower Farm to show the world the ways in which soil prep and fertilizing and bug control can be done both easily and compassionately while growing a beautiful outdoor space.

So really, I guess I’m starting this damn front yard garden because I’m on some sort of life mission (not yet fully actualized) to inspire other people. To show them how they can make a difference in their immediate ecosystem by planting a few native plants, stop using weed killers, and plant some flowers to feed the pollinators that are so desperately trying to stay alive in this age of climate destruction.

So there we have it. I’m turning my front yard into a pollinator garden not only because I want to, but because I hope it will inspire and show others how easy it really is to build biodiversity and enhance an immediate ecosystem with a few well-planned garden beds. That’s definitely enough to see this garden through to the end.

In Part 2, I’ll discuss my approach to mapping out the garden, ordering soil, and prepping for sheet mulching.

Peace, love, and pollinator gardens across all lands.

Fran Parrish