Low Maintenance Gardening

LOW-MAINTENANCE GARDENING

If you want a lovely garden but don’t have the time or energy to do a lot of work in it, help is at hand. There are countless ways you can minimize the amount of maintenance your garden requires, while still keeping it looking beautiful. I can make suggestions for designing an easy-care garden, as well as give you tips on reducing routine tasks and suggest a wide range of plants that can be happily left to take care of themselves.

Making Less Work

Creating and maintaining a beautiful garden doesn’t have to be time-consuming. there are dozens of ways in which the various components of the garden and the planting methods can be adapted to make maintenance easier.

Gardens should give pleasure and be places to enjoy. If yours takes up so much of your time in routine maintenance that you have little left in which to really appreciate it, you need to think about how to reduce the labour, without losing out on its beauty.

WHAT IS LOW MAINTENANCE?

Low maintenance does not simply mean cutting down on the number of plants that you grow. The choice of specimens and how you use them is more important — many plants require hardly any attention from one year to the next. You can also greatly reduce your workload with imaginative design and landscaping.

THE BENEFITS

A modestly sized, low-maintenance garden may require only half an hour a week to keep it looking good. But a truly low-maintenance garden, in which many labour-intensive components such as the lawn or difficult plants have been dispensed with, could require so little work that even if you took several weeks’ holiday, it would have little effect on the appearance.

ASSESSING YOUR GARDEN

You need to assess which jobs you enjoy and which you dislike, then set about modifying your garden in the order of your priorities and how much time you want to save. If you enjoy propagating but hate weeding, for instance, you need to eliminate the weeds, and if you don’t have time to mow the lawn you need to install other surfaces.

Take into account the style of your house and the existing shape and design of the garden itself to make sure that any new feature will fit in and not look out of place.

Check that new plants will grow happily in the soil and position. Some low-maintenance plants such as heathers and conifers have distinct soil preferences for you to consider.

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