You don’t have to pick between having a garden that’s beautiful, functional and stylish or having a garden that’s low maintenance. Your garden should be somewhere you love and enjoy spending your time, not somewhere that feels like a burden and you dread looking at or stepping into. Whether you don’t have the time, don’t have the energy or just don’t enjoy keeping up with the demand of a high maintenance garden, you can still create a garden you love without the work.

A simple way to have a low maintenance garden would be to scale back so there’s less to maintain in the first place. But if the minimalist style isn’t for you, you don’t have to settle for a simple, scaled back garden. As long as you opt for low maintenance plants, furniture and garden decor, you can have the garden of your dreams without the work.

Low Maintenance Lawn

EcoGrid Black 60mm Flexible Garden Edging

One of the most time consuming chores in the garden is tending to your lawn. Whether it’s mowing the lawn, feeding the grass, reseeding or strimming the edge of your lawn, there’s no doubt that having a lawn makes your garden higher maintenance. To have as low maintenance a garden as possible, replace your lawn with decking or a patio with wider borders or large planters for low maintenance plants. Decking and paving are much easier to maintain with the occasional sweep and clean. You also have the added benefit that you don’t need to take up space storing a lawn mower.

Although having no lawn fully removes the lawn aspect of maintenance in your garden, if you’d rather have a lawn but in a way that requires minimal maintenance, you have a couple of options. Maintenance all comes down to the size, shape and edging of your lawn. Creating a clear, established edge to your lawn will make it easier to mow up to the border of your lawn rather than needing to regularly tidy up the edges with a strimmer. This can be done using brick, paving, plastic or wooden lawn edging.

Smaller square or rectangular lawns on flat land are the easiest to maintain with a quick once over with your lawn mower every so often. Make life even easier by investing in an automatic grass mower. Having your mower somewhere that’s quick and easy to access will make this task easier. For example, you could store your mower in your garden shed or tool store.

Raised Planters

Rowlinson Patio Planter

One of the main aspects of gardening that puts people off is the uncomfortable kneeling and leaving over. Bringing your plants up to your level not only adds height to your garden but also makes maintaining your plants easier and more comfortable. Whether you use raised garden beds or patio plant pots, it can feel tempting to go for smaller containers to reduce the need for maintenance. However, smaller plant pots and raised beds actually take more maintenance than larger ones as they retain less water so need watering more often. Therefore, as an example, we would recommend using one large plant pot with 5 different plants in it instead of having 5 smaller plant pots, one for each plant.

Low Maintenance Plants

Raised planters make your plants easier to access, but that alone isn’t enough to make your garden low maintenance. To make your garden easy and quick to care for, the plants themselves need to be self-sufficient or low maintenance. The best low maintenance plants you can choose are tough perennials, shrubs and groundcover plants.

Two things you need to remember when planning your garden is to include plants that will show different textures and colours throughout the year so you can enjoy looking at and spending time in your garden all year round. It’s also important to check the average width and height of the plants you’re planning on using to ensure they won’t grow too big and regularly need trimming back.

Tough Perennials

Perennials are a great way to bring colour and beauty into your garden without the labour intensive care routine that many plants require. Many perennial plants make great additions to low maintenance gardens as they tend to live a long time and can withstand cold winters. However, make sure you choose tough perennials, not tender perennials to ensure long life and easy care.

Before deciding which perennials to plant in your garden, you need to identify what type of environment the plants will be living in and research which perennials will thrive best in that environment. This includes identifying the level of sun or shade that area gets, the type of soil you have and whether your garden will have periods of drought. For example, lavender is ideal for planting in a sunny environment with dry soil and can withstand periods of drought.

Tough perennials we recommend:

Shrubs

Shrubs are also a great low maintenance option for planting in your easy care garden (even better if you use perennial shrubs). Many shrubs are pretty much self-sufficient apart from needing some watering in very dry conditions and the occasional pruning. This makes shrubs the ideal low maintenance alternative to boring garden borders or flower beds. However, to ensure low maintenance (instead of regular pruning) it’s best to opt for slow growing shrubs and hedges.

Shrubs we recommend:

Groundcover Plants

As well as using low maintenance plants, groundcover plants are ideal for reducing the amount of weeding you need to do. Dense planting or using low-growing groundcover plants reduces the space available in the soil for weeds to be able to grow. Groundcover plants also tend to be tough and easy to care for, adding to the low maintenance goal.

Perennial groundcover plants we recommend:

Note: If deep root weeds do pop up (including bindweed, ground elder and knotweed), you need to ensure you remove the whole of the weeds roots, not just the top of the weed otherwise it will grow back.

Plants to Avoid

• Tender plants: These would need extra care to survive the winter.
• Fast growing shrubs (E.g. leylandii): These would need regular pruning.
• Climbing plants (E.g. ivy): These would need regular pruning.
• Tall vulnerable plants (E.g. delphiniums): These would need staking and more maintenance to stop the plant from collapsing and breaking.
• Plants that attract pests (E.g. hostas): These would take more maintenance to protect against pests.

Mulch

Kelkay 2-6mm Alpine Quartzite Grit Bulk Bag

Covering your soil with a thick layer of mulch will lock in moisture, reducing the amount of watering you need to do. A thick layer of mulch will also stop the light from reaching the soil, reducing the likelihood of unwanted weeds from growing. Whether you opt for bark mulch, gravel mulch or geotextile fabric, your garden will stay neat and weed-free for longer so you can just sit back and enjoy your flowers.

Rock Gardens

Similar to using mulch, creating a rock garden involves covering your soil with a thick layer of gravel or pebbles, reducing the amount of weeds in your garden. To further reduce the chance of weeds growing in your rock garden, use a layer of geotextile fabric under your layer of pebbles. Rockeries are decorated with larger rocks and smaller plants dotted around the covering of pebbles or gravel. Once created, rock gardens are pretty self-sufficient, just needing the occasional watering in dry conditions. And they look pretty great too!

Allow for Some Wild in Your Garden

If a neat and tidy garden design is not the landscape style you’re looking for, go wild with a more natural and wildlife friendly garden. Designing your quirky garden to embrace the wild will mean you have to spend less time pruning and weeding. It also means you’ll attract more wildlife into your garden. From birds and hedgehogs to ladybirds and other pollinators, bringing wildlife into your garden will create a natural way of dealing with pests.

Letting some wild into your garden can be anything from sowing a meadow mix of seeds in one of your raised planters to sectioning off an area of your garden and letting it grow as it wishes (with the occasional pruning to stop it from getting out of control). You could also bring some wild onto your patio by allowing low growing greenery to pop up between your paving stones, creating a charming cottage feel to your outdoor space.

Irrigation Systems

Gardena Comfort Full or Part Circle Pulse Sprinkler

Part of your garden upkeep with a lawn or any kind of plants will be watering your garden. To keep your garden looking its best and in its best possible condition, you may need to water your lawn and your plants daily during the dry summer weather. However, using an irrigation system can make it really easy to water your garden without having to do it yourself. Simply set up the irrigation system to cover your lawn and the flowers and plants in your garden, whether at ground level or in raised planters. Add a timer to your irrigation system to reduce your garden maintenance further. Worried about the cost of water? Connect your irrigation system to your garden water butt to recycle water and save money.

Artificial Greenery

Hedged In Artificial Instant GreenWall Hedge Panel Mixed Plants (100cm x 100cm)

Whatever kind of lawn or plants you have in your garden, they will require some level of maintenance, even if it is very minimal maintenance. If this minimal maintenance is still too much for you but you really want to bring greenery and colour into your garden, consider artificial greenery. Both artificial grass and artificial hedges are great options for bringing a natural look into your garden without any hassle.

Another option is to bring colour into your garden with your furniture or decor instead of flowers or greenery. Bright coloured furniture like the Royalcraft Monaco 3pc Egg Chair Setor coloured parasols like the Glatz ALU-TWIST 2.5x2m Rectangular Parasol bring colour and style into your garden without adding the additional upkeep of plants. Can’t find coloured furniture to suit your garden? You could always get your perfect wooden garden furniture and paint it any colour you want.

Low Maintenance Furniture

Rowlinson Plumley Set Grey Cushions + Grey Parasol

To be able to make the most of your time in your garden, you need garden furniture. Whether that’s a large seating area with a garden sofa set or dining set, multiple areas for entertaining or just a hidden away bench or bistro set for you to sit and enjoy the fresh air. But to keep your garden low maintenance, this outdoor furniture needs to be easy to care for.

Opting for weatherproof furniture means you can leave your furniture out all year round, saving on the hassle of trying to move heavy furniture to somewhere dry and safe over winter (and trying to find a storage space big enough to fit it). If you want to provide your outdoor furniture with some quick and easy extra protection over winter, you can use an easy to fit cover which will extend the life of your furniture without needing too much maintenance.

Check out these low maintenance, weather resistant furniture sets:

Solar Powered Lighting

Konstsmide 7809 Assisi Set of 2 Colour Changing Solar LED Lights

Getting the right lighting in your garden can make your outdoor space an oasis after dark. But installing and maintaining electric wiring in your garden is a hassle you don’t need. Instead, opting for solar powered lights (ensure they get direct sunlight to charge up) will make your garden shine without the need for wiring or garden plug sockets. Solar lights also come in a large range of styles to suit different garden designs and highlight different features of your garden. For example, you can illuminate your garden with solar powered spotlights, table lights, post lights or decorative lights.

Want to find out how to design the perfect lighting for your garden? Check out our garden lighting guide.

Low Maintenance Focal Points

Zest 4 Leisure Starlight Wooden Arch, Melmar Stone Dinova Fairy Dust White Marble Statue, Westbury 75cm Solar Powered Stainless Steel Sphere Water Feature.

Installing a focal point in your garden will make your garden more interesting to look at and more enjoyable to spend time in. Ensuring this focal point is low maintenance doesn’t mean it has to be boring.

Adding a garden arch, arbour, pergola or statue brings charm and personality to your outdoor space without adding any extra maintenance. Another option for a beautiful low maintenance focal point is a water feature. Water features like water fountains are easy to maintain (solar powered water fountains are even easier) and have a tranquil effect due to both the look and sound of the flowing water. However, for a low maintenance garden we don’t recommend certain water features like ponds as these require more upkeep.

Summary

Whatever size, shape and style of garden you have, create a beautiful space that you can enjoy without the long hours and hard work of maintaining it.

Check out Internet Gardener and start planning your low maintenance garden today.