Low-maintenance Landscaping

You can arrange your garden and modify the way you plant beds and borders so that very little regular maintenance will be required. You can also make your garden much more interesting in the process.

The Garden Floor
The greater part of most traditional gardens is given over to a large expanse of lawn, which is often edged by a path or a small area of paving. Lawns are time-consuming and expensive to maintain in good condition, and they can be boring. There are ways of keeping mowing to a minimum, but anyone wishing to cut down drastically on the labour involved should consider alternative surfaces such as gravel or paving for at least part of the area normally covered by the lawn.

Simpler Lawn Maintenance
If you want to keep a lawn there is a lot you can do to reduce mowing time to a minimum. Upgrading your lawnmower to a more powerful or wider cutting one is the most obvious, but eliminating fussy beds and curved edges to borders might speed things up by allowing you to mow in straight lines. There are also other approaches to try. Alternatively, keep just a small area of lawn, and plant ornamental grasses, ground-cover plants or shrubs over the remaining area.

Trimming Edges
Unsightly untrimmed edges can make a garden look untidy, but trimming with shears, long-handled or ordinary, is tedious and time consuming. If you have a lot of these to trim, invest in a powered lawn edge or nylon line trimmer with a swivel head, which can be used for this job as well as scything down persistent weeds. It is best to buy the sturdiest you can afford, as the lighter versions can prove less economical in the long term.

Multi-level Mowing
Another way to reduce the amount of time spent mowing is to cut different parts of the lawn at different intervals, leaving some areas to grow longer. This involves cutting broad pathways regularly, and mowing other areas every second or third time with the mower blade set higher giving a more natural appearance. You can leave some grass uncut except for a couple of cuts a season, but it will probably need to be cut with a nylon line trimmer instead of a lawnmower.