BACK TO THE FRONT

Really, nobody knows what to do with the front garden. You can watch a thousand of those garden makeover programmes, read all the books, pay the most expensive landscape gardener to design something bold and visionary - the front garden is always going to be dead space. All it's really there for is to keep the road at bay.

The basic trouble with the front garden is it's so exposed. There's no other way of looking at it - as soon as you do anything in the front garden you are putting on a show. Your next door neighbours, the people across the street, and anyone passing can watch the show, free of charge, just by looking in the right direction. And you're there, centre stage, doing your utmost to remember your lines. Suddenly everything you do is a performance.

You try trimming back that bush covering the path - suddenly everyone's a theatre critic, offering advice and telling you what they think of the garden.

You put out the bins - the local wildlife are watching like it's some new garden farce.

Ever played tennis on someone's front lawn? Welcome to Centre Court!

So, unless you live in a mansion or a farm and your front lawn is so vast that the road is somewhere over the horizon, you may as well resign yourself to the fact that that front garden is dead space. All it does is makes it clear where the road ends and your place starts. Without it, strangers could confuse your house for a turn off. Joggers would be coming in off the street, wiping their shoes on the doormat and helping themselves to stuff from your fridge before you could blink. Which, I guess, wouldn't be so bad if you were an athletics fan.