Side yards are usually peripheral matters, and rather neglected, but they deserve a closer look. With a little bit of imagination, that strip of grass or gravel on the side of the house can become a charming and respectable part of your garden.

Side yards naturally do not receive the attention gardeners are willing to devote to their front yard, the public face of their garden, or to the back, their private oasis and escape. In the narrow space between one house and the next, we stash recycling bins, coil up hoses, stack bags of mulch and park our bicycles. It's a passageway, and often a grim one.

In neighborhoods where houses are close together, a side yard is often narrow and shaded by adjacent structures. It may not be possible to plant sun-loving flowers in such a space, but there are lots of ways to make a side yard of any size a more pleasant place.

To start with, you might install a pretty gate. A handsome garden gate always looks inviting, and it will inspire you to take steps to make the space inside the gate more interesting, too. A gate wide enough for a wheelbarrow is called for. Outside the gate, fill a big flowerpot with bright flowers. Impatiens will bloom all summer long even in a shady spot, but you could decide to fill the pot with texture instead of color -- try a big hosta or two, or a few exuberant ferns. A small shrub -- a boxwood, a hydrangea or a spirea -- also looks great in a flowerpot and will not need pampering.

Side yards tend to lead someplace else, and stepping-stones enhance the notion of an attractive destination. They make the space look tidy, and are very functional in wet weather. Large stepping-stones are the most practical; you should lay them quite close together, but you can avoid the look of a paved runway -- which also rushes you through the space -- with irregularly shaped flagstones. Combinations of bricks and flagstones are also very handsome.

Sometimes side yards are just that: They're simply a space separate from the rest of the garden, leading nowhere in particular, rather like a balcony. A small space, hidden away, can be a wonderfully relaxing spot. It could also easily be put to use as a potting station. A potting table (from a garden shop, or even an old hutch from a thrift store) gives you a place to organize your tools and supplies, without stealing space in the garage or from the rest of the garden. A trash can with a lid will hold potting soil, and flowerpots stack neatly under the potting bench. A gardener in California turned his side yard into a potting alcove by getting rid of a plastic shed and installing a table and panels with slats of bamboo to hold hand tools. He recycled ordinary six-sided concrete pavers from another project, and stained them to make them look like weathered terracotta.

The incentive to make the side yard more attractive is much greater when you can see the space from inside the house. A bubbling fountain in a bed of dark cobbles moves the focus from a featureless fence or the neighboring house's siding to something more lively. A gardener in Kansas City installed a wall fountain in his side yard; the fountain doesn't crowd the narrow space, and it definitely improves the view from his living-room window. Even a small birdbath on a pedestal, filled regularly with fresh water, will bring both birds and reflected light into a side yard, and immediately make it look more like a garden. A bench, painted to match the trim of your house, furnishes the space.

Trash has to be dealt with, but you can reduce its impact in your surroundings by building a functional but good-looking enclosure for the bins in a side yard. Plans for small sheds and enclosures are available on the Internet and are adaptable to all kinds of spaces. A sloping roof is important to keep rain and snow out of recycling bins, but doors may not be necessary.

Turning a side yard into an attractive spot -- or at least into a pleasant perspective, instead of letting it fill up with clutter -- doesn't take a lot of time or a big investment. The main thing is to take a fresh look: There is great potential in small spaces.

Gardening is an art -- and flowers and foliage are the dabs of paint that bring the canvas of a garden to life.

For the great Impressionist artist Claude Monet, the distinction between art and gardens was grandly and gloriously blurred. His garden in Giverny, France, was his inspiration. "My most beautiful work of art is my garden," he said. It captivated his imagination and filled his canvases. To see a bit of what he saw and how he saw it, plant a Monet garden.

The New York Botanical Garden did just that last year, drawing on Monet's palette and ideas in an elaborate exhibition designed to evoke the artist's passion for plants and to inspire visitors to create artistic gardens of their own.

"He just knew how to use colors," says Karen Daubmann, director of exhibitions at NYBG. The exhibition was "lush and immersive," she says, "but I hope that people could look at his garden beds and say, 'I could do a chunk of that in my backyard.'"

Monet was an enthusiastic gardener who searched out the newest and best plants for his garden, experimented with combinations of colors and textures, and planted trial beds, which he called "paint-box beds."

"Monet really inspired us," Daubmann says. "He was always eagerly awaiting anything he could get his hands on. He feels like a kindred spirit."

Monet's garden in France is an exceedingly popular tourist destination; hundreds of thousands of visitors come every year to see the tulips in spring and to cross the green Japanese bridge over the pond, to see the magical light for themselves and the famous water lilies in bloom. Large and elaborate gardens can be intimidating, but gardeners have long embraced Monet's exuberant garden style, adapting it to the scale of their own backyards.

"Monet crowded everything together," says Adair Weingart, who works with a group of master gardeners on a Monet garden in the Kansas City area, at the Overland Park (Kan.) Arboretum and Botanical Gardens. To bring Monet's style to the edge of the prairie, she says, "we make sure there is a layering of plants, from ground level all the way up." The garden was planned and planted in 2003 and has become one of the most popular areas of the botanical gardens.

About 75 Kansas master gardeners work on the Monet garden every year, meeting there each week to plant, prune, weed and maintain the garden. They plant restful color schemes -- pink and white on one side of a path and blue and white on the other -- in what they call the "morning garden," where the light is soft. Their "sunset garden" is filled with reds, oranges and yellows. "Monet had those on the west side, too," Weingart says. "The light reflected on them so intensely, and they seemed to glow."

Monet planted white flowers here and there throughout his garden so that, even in shaded areas, the light would seem to sparkle. He studied "the art of reflection," Weingart says. He grew roses on trellises, lifting the flowers up into the light, where he painted them against a clear blue sky. "It was also the framing," Weingart says, "the way he would use trees and shrubs and plants to frame a specific thing. It was an intentional organization. He created that view."

Weingart has never been to Giverny, and Daubmann did not have the chance to visit, either, but Monet's considerable body of work make his garden style and philosophy accessible. The exhibition at NYBG included two paintings of Monet's irises. His paint palette was also part of the show: It could in itself be a design for a flower garden, with bright yellow flowers, splashes of coral, rich blues, green and gray of every hue, and dabs of white, like the light piercing a leafy canopy.

The NYBG produced a spreadsheet of the more than 600 plants they used in the exhibition. A water lily that blooms in the pond at Giverny and in Monet's series of enormous water-lily paintings is a variety named James Brydon. Like Monet, the gardeners at NYBG also grew dahlias, sunflowers, zinnias, nasturtiums, cosmos, hollyhocks, more than a dozen different roses, and bright red geraniums.

An authentic Monet garden needs a touch of paint, too. The shutters and stairs at Monet's house, his Japanese bridge, and the great arches over a garden path are all a distinctive green. At NYBG, researchers matched it to Pantone 327 (and Benjamin Moore Juniper 2048-20), a green with a lively infusion of teal. A bridge and other architectural elements in the exhibition were all painted Pantone 327.

"It's a great color," Daubmann says. "It looks fantastic with plants, no matter what we put next to it. If you are inspired to transform your garden with a can of paint, try it on a bench or on flowerpots," she says. Set your bench among the flowers, and when the light is just right, you'll have yourself a masterpiece.

SIDEBAR

MORE ON MONET

To bring out the art in a garden, turn to an artist for inspiration. Gardeners today can grow some of the same water lilies Claude Monet cultivated in his garden in Giverny, France, about 50 miles northwest of Paris, where he lived for 43 years. The garden is maintained today as it was in Monet's day.

-- Monet blurred the formal edges of his garden with exuberant blooms of all kinds, letting sunflowers and hollyhocks lean as they liked, and allowing nasturtiums to sprawl riotously across paths. For plenty of inspiration, visit the garden's substantial website at giverny.org.

-- Highlights of the New York Botanical Garden's exhibition on Monet's garden remain on the NYBG website: www.nybg.org/exhibitions/2012/monet/index.php.

-- The Overland Park Arboretum and Botanical Gardens in Kansas City is open every day except Christmas. The Monet Garden is especially pretty from spring through frost. For information, visit www.opkansas.org.