Eye-catching entryway plantings packed with color help your home extend a friendly welcome.

First impressions count, and when you preface a front door with floral and foliage fireworks, you create an atmosphere of gracious warmth. A colorful entry also adds curb appeal, which enhances home value. The trick is to arrange plantings that blend fuss-free style with traffic-stopping beauty. Add a trickling fountain to mute traffic noise, or, if you don’t have the space, embrace a container garden that features a variety of different blooms and buds to appeal to guests and potential home buyers alike.

Boost curb appeal with color

Using seasonal color in a front yard works well for several reasons. It provides a loom on which you can weave different planting patterns year to year, so for a gardener who enjoys designing plantings, an entry garden furnishes endless opportunities to satisfy the craving for staging something new. In areas with rugged winters and ample snowfall, quick color that disappears with the frost means no worries about plant damage from road salt or piles of snow. And whenever you trade turf for plantings, you reduce lawn-mowing duties—a cause to cheer.

Profusion Series Zinnia

This mounding grower is blanketed with daisy-like blooms.