What is the common practice for backyards? Should I use landuse=grass or leisure=garden + garden:type=residential? See an example below:
for a plain lawn (like your photo above), I’d go with grass. garden implies something a bit more curated, with at least a few flower beds, ornamental trees, vegetables patches, etc.
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I would not hesitate to tag these as private gardens according to the wiki page saying
The most common form is known as a residential garden and is generally found in proximity to a residence, such as the front or back garden.
There is no such condition that flowerbeds or other decorative plants must be part of such a place. The same applies to the definition of garden in Wikipedia:
A garden is a planned space, usually outdoors, set aside for the cultivation, display, and enjoyment of plants and other forms of nature.
A patch of grass with or without some shrubs or trees can serve well to enjoy plants and nature imo. And according to Wikipedia it also fits the definition of garden in british english which is the base for all OSM tags:
The term “garden” in British English refers to a small enclosed area of land, usually adjoining a building.
So even if this small enclosed area adjoining a building would be covered with weeds it would still be a garden.
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That is not an either-or question.
There’s grass – that’s valid and verifiable information about the physical reality on the ground. You can map the grass whether or not that area qualifies as a garden.
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Sure, but I personally always avoid to overlap different landuses as far as possible. Apparantly theses houses are part of landuse=residential. Adding leisure=garden is fine imo. If I really want to add another area tag I would go for landcover=grass + natural=tree/shrub or whatever applies.
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landuse would mean you’d need to create a multipolygon to stamp it out of the landuse=residential.
And for ME the Garden belongs to the landuse=residential. Thats the big dispute about landuse=grass - It does not have a “use” or meaning in itself.
It should have been deprecated a long time ago, but people want to “draw” maps and dont care about semantics. If we’d have landcover= beeing rendered this would be easy.
Mapping private, individual gadens as leisure feels a bit overreaching.
Flo
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Posting this resource - Tag:landuse=greenery - OpenStreetMap Wiki which has a table of greenery-like tags and how they’re rendered by Carto.
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Yes, but that feels like an overly broad interpretation to me. If any patch of mowed grass is a “garden”, the tag is so nonspecific it has lost useful meaning IMO.
The most common form is known as a residential garden and is generally found in proximity to a residence, such as the front or back garden.
This doesn’t imply that all patches of grass next to residences are gardens. Just that gardens are commonly found next to residences.
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This is surely a matter of personal interpretation. In common language people in many countries talk about their “garden” or “Garten” or “jardin” when they want to adress the few square meters of ground around their home and nobody cares about the type of plants growing there. If it is small or big, covered with grass and weed or orchids does not matter for the proud owner. I think that is what the Wikipedia article is also referring to.
I personally do not map such private gardens at all. I map the house, any additinonal building and sometimes permanent swimming pools on private properties and that’s it. All the rest is part of the landuse=residential for me. But if I would want to map it, my choice would be leisure=garden for sure instead of adding a nonsense tag like landuse=grass.
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I think there might be regional differences in how the word is used. Where I’m from “backyard” and “frontyard” are the general terms for areas around someone’s house, and “garden” is more specific (referring to something more than a patch of lawn).
Sorry for the confusion, it does seem your view is more in line with how the OSM tag is used 
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You are absolutely right saying a few square meters of grass is something different from a carefully designed garden with a large variety of plants but yes, there are these regional differences in using certain terms in different languages or even the same language (english) spoken in different regions of the world.
I heard the term “backyard” first time in Australia from people talking about their lovingly cared for beautiful (but small) garden and it made me laugh, cause where I grew up backyard (=Hinterhof) is associated with a grey place with concrete surface where all this stuff like waste bins, bicycles, clothes racks and the like is stored:
Actually the same problem with the terms “villa”, “windmill” and “concrete_plates” having completely different meanings in different countries is discussed in parallel topics so this is something we will face as long as OSM exists
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Difference between American and British English.
In the UK these “backyards” are called back gardens so leisure=garden seems natural. For an example have a look around Edinburgh where it’s been done a lot.
landuse=grass is still used for the semi-public patch of lawn in front of something like a housing block or a care home.
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there is absolutely nothing wrong with landuse=grass within landuse=residential
I guess you can also use surface=grass
why? landuse=grass can be within almost any landuse (and is not really a land use, it is more land cover)
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Similarly to different understandings of “garden” or “backyard” also the use of the landuse=* is understood differently. A part of the community (including myself) understands it as an attribute describing the predominant use of a larger area, not to be overlapped with other landuse values as far as possible, others say piling several landuses on top of each other is fine.
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https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:garden:type#Common_values does say “it doesn’t really matter if it is a plain lawn, or complex garden in French style.” And I agree, a garden is still a garden, even if it’s just grass (the gardens in my original post’s image also have trees on their sides). I agree with @Map_HeRo, I’ll be using leisure=garden, garden:type=residential and access=private.
JOSM lists for values of garden:type=private as well which has 26k use garden:type=private | Tags | OpenStreetMap Taginfo of which the wiki says
" Denotes that the garden belongs to a private residency. Potentially synonymous to garden:type=residential."
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yes, but @flohoff states himself that landuse=grass does in fact describe no landuse (which is also mentioned in the wiki), so consequently there is also no discrepancy with overlapping areas
well, the trick is that landuse=grass is not for “predominant use of a larger area”. Like landuse=flowerbed.
Also, multiple landuses as defined will overlap. For example industrial site in a military base will feature valid landuse=industrial with landuse=military
The same for typical forested area on a military polygon uses for exercises that do not leave UXO - this area is both landuse=military and a forest plantation.
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Seems like osm really should finally do something about landuse=* and landcover=* and surface=* and natural=*.
Because the whole garden is… well, a garden. And not everything in the garden has to be grass. There are some examples where people use pebbles for their garden for easier meintance. So, while it can be a leisure=garden, the grass shoud imho opinion be tagged as landcover=grass and not landuse.
There was a good wiki-article about this topic by @imagic (i think) but since they deleted it, i’m not sure they would be happy if i share it here.
I would recommend starting from Forest - OpenStreetMap Wiki subset if someone has too much hair or wants to study fun coordination/definition case.