• A townhouse back yard can have personality with a little planning.Garden Patio 1 image by Bucks from Fotolia.com
  
  Even a very small back yard can be a refuge in nature with some inventive landscaping. Your townhouse can feel as if it is out in the country if you turn the yard into a habitat. Your tiny deck will hold the musical sounds of water as well as any woodland with the right pots and pump. In addition, creating a focal point with flowers and foliage lends drama to a limited space.
  
  

Wildscaping

• If you feel like city life is too far removed from nature, wildscape your townhouse back yard and attract more of what flutters, climbs and scampers. Create a diverse landscape by planting trees and shrubs along the fence or around the perimeter of the space. Layer in perennials, annuals and groundcover, selecting flowers and foliage to provide food and habitats for wild things. Black-eyed Susans are butterfly-friendly; sweet pea provides bee nectar. Crabapples are good for nesting in and honeysuckle is a favorite of hummingbirds. An arbor of grapes or lilacs is beautiful, fragrant and friendly to winged creatures. Place a birdbath high enough to make it safe to drink and keep the water clean. A small pond with a circulating fountain can provide water for ground dwellers and a garden of herbs and vegetables will make field bunnies very happy. But be warned: pigeons, rats and mice are city critters, too. You can't always pick and choose your wild neighbors.
  
  

Multitasking with Focus

• A townhouse back yard needs a focal point to pull together a design idea and give the space some coherence. Make yours a beautiful stucco wall painted a hot tropical color, like an intense purplish pink, sunflower yellow or cornflower blue. Espalier one or two fruit trees against the wall and plant vines to climb it and curl over the top. Bougainvillea is a fabulous wall hugger and adds its own vivid hue. Where a small patio meets the wall, mass containers for vivid annuals--a collection of old, mossy terra cotta pots looks terrific. So do weathered teak planters, galvanized tubs or half-barrels with trellises that hold climbing plants, wildflowers and groundcover. If you have room, nurture a tiny patch of velvet lawn for barefoot dancing or playing bocce.
  
  

Miniature Water Features

• A small back yard feels larger with a water feature. If your townhouse offers the typical postage-stamp yard, you can still listen to the sound of trickling music while sitting out on your deck in the evening. Just think compact and vertical and an attractive waterfall is yours for the making. A small fountain might be a large garden pot with a copper pipe to bubble the water just up over the surface but still inside the pot--very self-contained and it nestles beautifully in between containers of ornamental grasses. Or cement two or three clay pots of graduated sizes together so that the water flows out the top one, spills into a larger middle pot and pours down into the large, wide pot that holds water lilies and maybe even a few small goldfish. You can purchase a stone orb that sits in its own pan of river rocks, spilling water out of the top and down the side into the pan of rocks, where it is recycled. A little imagination and very little space are all you need.