Love your garden a little bit more with our tips on low maintenance gardening. From incorporating a low maintenance landscape design to practical advice on easy garden maintenance, we’ll show you that creating a relaxing outdoor living space doesn’t have to be hard work.
If you look at your garden and think ‘where do I begin?’, you are not alone! Keeping a garden looking good all year round can be a challenge, but there are ways you can make garden maintenance easier for yourself, saving you time and effort. In this blog we’ll look at simple techniques that, as landscape gardeners in the Cotswolds, we’ve been using to keep our clients’ gardens blooming naturally. Here are our top low maintenance landscape design tips:
The biggest plant in your garden is likely to be the lawn, and this is where so many garden maintenance problems lie. Lawns look lovely but only if they are well looked after.
If you have a lot of lawn, then rethink how you use it, perhaps by incorporating grass or planting areas with native plants Unless you need it for a game of football, you could break it up with areas of paving or gravel to create cosy hidden spaces for entertaining or relaxing
(see our blog for more ideas on this).
If you are attached to your lawn, then think about ways to make lawn care easier to manage.. Trimming lawn edges is particularly time-consuming, so one low maintenance landscape design technique that we use is to create easy-to care for edges. Edging the lawn with a run of bricks or a paved pathway means no fiddly trimming once the mower has been put away!
Planters seem like an obvious choice for easy garden maintenance, but they are not always as obliging as you’d hope! The truth is, pots need regular watering, and in the summer months, that does mean every day, even if there’s been a light shower.
As a general rule of thumb, the smaller the pot, the quicker it will dry out, which means you will need to water it more regularly, requiring more regular maintenance. If you can use larger pots or planters, they will be easier to look after as they retain more moisture in the soil.
Put a plant in the right place and it can virtually look after itself. So when it comes to low maintenance landscape design, make sure you do your groundwork first. Plot the type of soil, shade and sun you have in different areas of the garden, and find plants that thrive in those conditions.
It is not always an easy thing to get right, and sometimes you won’t know if you’ve cracked it or not until a season or two later. But, we always say, don’t be afraid to move plants that are not thriving, even if they’ve been in the ground for a while, ensuring your garden remains a vibrant green space.
This may sound obvious, but a key element to easy garden maintenance is having everything you need on hand. And that doesn’t just mean the lawn mower that’s buried at the back of the garage, or the wheelbarrow that’s dumped at the bottom of the garden.
In order to keep a low maintenance garden, your gardening tools need to be low maintenance too. Have everything you need in one place, making professional gardening tasks more efficient. Arrange tools so they are hanging on hooks or so they are kept together on a separate shelf in the garage or shed.
Keep the watering can next to a source of water for easy watering of containers. That way, the few jobs you do need to keep on top of won’t seem like such big chores.
Simplicity is key to low maintenance landscape garden design, especially when using lean grass and hardy shrubs. Plants always look best when planted in groups, so use this to your advantage. Limit yourself to a few species or colourways and plant them together to maximise the effect. Choose easy to care for plants, such as hardy shrubs, evergreens such as hellebores and sedges, or bulbs that come up every year, such as daffodils and tulips.
Trying to make sure your garden is blooming year round is what the experts are for! As Cotswold landscape gardeners, we have expert knowledge of planting design and can advise on plants that give you colour and texture throughout the year, including beautiful wild flowers like field scabious. For example, planting fine, willowy grasses next to glossy-leaved evergreens or pink hued sedums next to frothy ferns: low maintenance planting with maximum impact.
It is important to remember that with any type of gardening, whether it’s low maintenance landscape design or carefully manicured topiaries, you are still dealing with nature. And nature can be unpredictable. So, try not to fret if a weed pops up in the wrong place or a smattering of leaves falls onto your flower beds. In fact, go a step further and create more wild areas in your garden.
Be mindful of your mowing regime. Plant Life’s No Mow May initiative was created to encourage gardeners to leave their lawns to grow long during the month of May. This was to attract pollinators, and, in turn, other wildlife, to your garden, turning it into a food source for many creatures. Give it a go next May and you’ll be amazed at how your outdoor area will be transformed, just from a bit of low maintenance gardening!
As experienced landscape gardeners in the Cotswolds we design gardens with many different outcomes. One of the most common requests is for low maintenance gardening design. If you would like to know more about how we can create a low maintenance landscape garden design for you, including incorporating green space and fruit trees, please do get in touch with our team.
