So often as a garden designer clients request a low maintenance garden and my heart begins to sink. Planting in gardens is often the main issue of contention as clients want a garden but they don’t have the time to look after it. They can appreciate the benefits of having a garden but they don’t see themselves as gardeners.

The soft landscaping in any garden design is an incredibly important aspect of the full service that garden designers offer. It balances out the hard landscaping, softening the house and new garden areas into the landscape. It helps to frame views and vistas around the garden whilst at the same time providing resources for birds, bees and butterflies.

Low maintenance gardens, is there really such a thing? This blog offers some guidance on how garden maintenance can be reduced whilst still benefiting from having a beautiful outdoor garden to enjoy throughout the year.

8 Top Tips for a Low Maintenance Garden

Strategically Positioned Planting
One of the many benefits of employing a garden designer is that they can really help provide you with a good balance between hard and soft landscaping resulting in a beautiful outdoor space without too much maintenance. A good garden design will look at positioning planting beds and borders that make the most of views and vistas throughout the garden. This way planting can be used to good effect with minimal maintenance allowing you to enjoy having a beautiful garden with a healthy balance of hard and soft landscaping and not too much maintenance.

Planting Groups
By keeping your planting palette simple and repeating plants throughout the garden not only does this provide continuity and rhythm but also allows maintenance tasks to be carried out in a targeted and structured way. When you have a quick hour to spend in the garden you can pop out and deadhead your roses or cut back the Nepeta to get a second flush of flowers.

No Bare Ground
Plants and lots of them. So often I have been to see potential clients who have lamented about the amount of time they spend weeding. Usually due to the fact that they plant with a meter of bare soil between two plants. Fill your beds with plants and the weeds have nowhere to seed and nowhere to grow and you benefit from lots of lovely flowers instead of those pesky ones you don’t want.

*Vinca is a great ground cover plant for those out of the way places.*

Ground Cover Plants
Know your ground cover plants and use them wisely. These are plants such as Geraniums, Pachysandra and Vinca all lovely plants that give you pleasing textures and colours throughout the year and are great at suppressing weeds because they cover the ground in the growing season giving weeds nowhere to grow.

Mulching
Mulching, mulching, mulching…….. Mulching suppresses weeds, improves your soil structure, looks tidy, protects your plants roots and retains water in the soil. What’s not to love about it.

Mixed Borders
Mixed borders allow you to have a garden without the need to continually preen your garden. Shrubs are great stalwarts that happily take up space and do there thing with minimal maintenance. A good back bone of shrubs with front edging of perennial plants allows for a long lasting display of interest at different times with low maintenance requirements.

Plant Bulbs
In our planting plans we always include bulb planting. They are great doers they come up year after year and happily get on with the job in hand before dieing back and resting before happily doing it all again. The only thing that you may need to do is top them up every now and then.

*Fritillaria are great bulbs to naturalise in long grass*

Get a Gardener
If you really want a garden and don’t have the time to look after it then pay someone else to. This way you get to enjoy the benefits of having a beautiful garden, you get to choose the maintenance tasks that you enjoy and it takes all the stress of having a garden away.