Comparing the characteristics of front and back domestic gardens in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

Abstract

In Australia, suburban front gardens have been said to be for show, while back gardens have been thought to be used more productively. This pattern may have changed as a result of a change in the ways that western suburbanites use and value their gardens. In 107 gardens in 10 suburbs of Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, data on the floristic composition, structural characteristics and some use attributes were collected from front and back yards. The floristic data were used to classify the yards into types, many of which preferentially occurred in either front or back. Back yards preferentially containing food plant taxa, and had a larger proportion of lawn, dogs and chicken coops, while front yards preferentially contained showy and screening plant taxa, and had relatively high small shrub cover. However, in a large proportion of properties, the garden type in the front yard was the same as the type in the back yard. In another large proportion of properties the front yard was gardened more intensively than the back, indicating a desire to impress, but the back yard was not used for productive purposes. These gardens preferentially occurred in the older suburbs, while gardens that were showier in the back than the front were negatively correlated with the unemployment rate. In a relatively small proportion of properties showy gardens were located in the front yard, while productive gardens were located in the back yard. The prevalence of these gardens had no relationships with suburb characteristics. The wide variety of garden types, and of their combinations in back and front yards, both within and between suburbs, indicate a complexity not reducible to simple aphorisms.

Introduction

‘… front and back (yards) are a dialectical pair, defining each other negatively, and to understand either, we must look at both’ (Seddon, 1997, p. 160).

A substantial proportion of the land area of western cities is occupied by domestic gardens. For example, in 1980, 19.5% of the area of the city of Dayton, Ohio, United States, consisted of the gardens of single family dwellings (Sanders and Stevens, 1984). Urban vegetation, of which, it is safe to presume, domestic gardens generally comprise a large proportion, strongly influences urban climate (McPherson et al., 1997), air quality (Jo and McPherson, 2001) and aesthetics (Ulrich, 1986). Domestic gardens also provide habitat for wildlife (Thompson et al., 1993, Chamberlain et al., 2004, French et al., 2005), as well being a sink for resources (Uhl, 1998), a source of weeds that can harm adjacent natural vegetation and agriculture (Zagorski et al., 2004, Sullivan et al., 2005), and, in some cases, a location of production for personal use (Head et al., 2004). Considering the ever-increasing amount of land covered by domestic gardens (an inevitable consequence of increasing urbanisation), the various implications of their composition and management, and the variety of potential uses for which they are maintained, it would seem appropriate for urban planners to develop a greater understanding of the characteristics of domestic gardens (Jim, 1993), and the motivations of those who create them (Head and Muir, 2004, Zagorski et al., 2004).

With over 85% of its population living in urban centres, Australia is a nation of suburbanites (Bridgman et al., 1995). Despite the recent popularity of very large houses on very small blocks, and inner city high rise apartments, most households still live in a dwelling with both a front yard, facing the street, and a back yard, hidden from casual observation by house and fences.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries the back yard was used primarily to produce food for domestic use, and for other useful tasks, such as mechanical repairs and the disposal of faecal waste (Seddon, 1997). In contrast to the back yard, the Australian front yard was a place for a display of respectability, akin to the parlour within the house (Malor, 2002). Recent research in England suggests that ‘privacy, sociability and sensual connections to nature’ are the main functions of the current domestic garden (Bhatti and Church, 2004, p. 37), rather than social display or production, a transition also mooted for Australia by Seddon (1997) and Mullins and Kynaston (2000). This transition in the use of the domestic garden may have reduced the contrast between front and back yards.

There are a small number of papers that document differences in species composition between gardens as a whole (Matulec, 2003, Wu et al., 2004, Zagorski et al., 2004). There are also at least two papers (Dorney et al., 1984, Richards et al., 1984) that quantitatively compare characteristics of front and back suburban gardens, both in the United States. In Shorewood, a suburb of Milwaukee, 11 ornamental shrubs and trees were more than twice as common in the front than the back yard, whereas the reverse pertained for 3 other ornamental species and 1 that produced edible fruit (Dorney et al., 1984). In Syracuse, New York, vegetable gardens, flower gardens, trees as a whole and neglected trees were concentrated in back yards, while intensively cared for shrubs and hedges were concentrated in front yards (Richards et al., 1984).

The present paper analyses floristic, structural and artificial attributes in front and back yards in 10 suburbs of Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, in order to determine the degree and nature of the differences between them, and any relationships these similarities and differences may bear to suburb characteristics. The results of these analyses will be valuable for understanding the nature of the domestic garden resource within the suburbs, provide a baseline to determine changes, and a basis for predicting the nature of back gardens from the characteristics of the more easily observed front gardens.