The Sociable Approach

Hemmed in on one side by a huge snout of a garage, on the other by an equally imposing wall of juniper shrubs, Tim Delaney's front yard was just a standard carpet of lawn to scurry past on the way to the door. "There wasn't much reason to be out front," Delaney says of his two-story house in Sauganash, on the city's Northwest Side. "I would just walk by and go inside." The house's stone exterior is distinctive but its landscaping was quiet, to say the least.

Sauganash is an old-line neighborhood, where residents promenade in the evenings and want to know their neighbors. It's the kind of place where a front porch gets used. But Delaney's antisocial front yard didn't suggest neighbors might want to linger to talk about the kids or the Cubs.

For help, Delaney turned to landscape designer Tim Thoelecke, then head of the Glenview firm Garden Concepts (he now teaches). Thoelecke envisioned not a literal front porch but a social place at ground level, an inviting haven where the private indoor sphere and the public world of the sidewalk met halfway.

	Before
The front door hardly said "Welcome!"-more like, "Oh, you're here?" The new trellis draped with sweet autumn clematis and the bluestone walkway make it more hospitable. Tim Delaney says he was reluctant to get rid of the tidy yews beneath his front windows, but once Garden Concepts replaced them with viburnums that release a heady spring fragrance, he recognized the wisdom of letting go.

Thoelecke and his fellow designer, Jennifer Hoxsie (who has since joined her husband's Lake Bluff firm, Greenhaven Landscapes), laid a bluestone patio where much of the lawn had been, surrounded it with blooming, fragrant, seasonally changing plants, including a sweet autumn clematis growing up a trellis attached to the garage, and wound up with a "porch" that's so inviting, you hardly feel a need to go inside.

The back yard had its own issues. With the recent loss of two enormous evergreen trees that had given the yard a woodsy feel for his first 13 years in the house, Delaney found himself looking out at a row of scraggly arborvitaes and an old chain-link fence. And the deck felt different; once an airy vantage point for enjoying the big trees, suddenly it was a "pedestal that cut you off from the yard below," Delaney says.

Thoelecke and Hoxsie's solution was to give the rear yard a sharply geometrical layout, its diagonal orientation giving it a sense of movement and enlarging it visually. (Use those same rectilinear components but turn them foursquare to the house, and you'd give the eye less incentive to wander along edges and around corners.) It's also a much more usable space than a slab of lawn would be. A pair of benches, a path that cuts through the lush plantings near the fence, and a gravel walk that vanishes around the corner of the house are all functional elements that encourage Delaney and his guests to get out there and stay awhile.

	Before
Blueprint for a Green Space The deck drew people out of the house but then failed to deliver anything but a view of grass and some gangly evergreens along the alley. Creating a lower-level patio and punctuating the space with a fountain gave the newly comfortable yard an appealing dynamism.

With a high wooden fence replacing the chain-link eyesore and a broad buffer zone created by low plantings, the space is as private, in its own way, as the old pine-and-spruce iteration. The calming splash of water in a fountain masks alley noise.

The fragrance of a viburnum in bloom, the sound of crushed stone crunching underfoot, and the gratifying sight of the changing colors as seasons turn are all gifts this garden gives to people who venture up off the sidewalk in front, or down off the deck in back.