An Introduction To Low-Maintenance Gardening

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 time left 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 as many plants require hardly any attention from 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 and 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 vacation, 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 like mowing the lawn you need to install other surfaces, which require less maintenance.

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.