Brilliant low-maintenance plants for beautiful gardens
Low-maintenance plants are difficult to kill. They look good in your garden for a long time, and don’t require complicated pruning or feeding.
Here are my favourites.
- Topiary
- Lavender (see the best way to prune lavender)
- Hydrangeas (see everything you need to know about hydrangeas)
- Asters and symphytricom
- Ornamental grasses
- Geums
- Geraniums
- Day lilies
- Most shade-loving shrubs
Having seen professional gardeners wince at the phrase ‘low-maintenance’, with its connotations of neglected, dusty shrubs in municipal borders, I hadn’t thought too much about the concept. Then I started doing monthly video garden tours of our garden on the Middlesized Garden YouTube channel.
I found myself talking about some of the same plants for months on end. And they were often plants that needed the least care, or were most admired by visitors. I’ve picked out 10 for two videos on my Plant Heroes.
Topiary, lavender and (at the back) silver birch are three of my favourite low-maintenance plants.
If you’re concerned about which plants are poisonous to dogs or cats, then read how to puppy-proof your garden. There are so many plants that are toxic to humans or pets. The best route is to teach children and pets not to eat plants, because it isn’t realistic to have a garden without some toxic plants.
Plus expert advice for time-poor people
I also asked RHS award-winning garden designer and fellow garden Youtuber Lee Burkhill, of Garden Ninja garden design, for his top low-maintenance plants.
Lee Burkhill, award-winning garden designer and Garden Ninja.
‘My client base are in their late 20s and early 30s,’ says Lee. ‘They’re looking at their gardens as an outdoor room, and they do want plants they can get involved with. They’re willing to do things in the garden. However, they are time-poor, and need fuss-free plantings. So I provide a maintenance schedule with all my plantings, so they know what to do when.’
Grasses are super low-maintenance
While shrubs have generally been considered low-maintenance plants, Lee prefers grasses: ‘You don’t have to do anything to them, apart from cut them down once a year. They provide evergreen interest and can sort out a few problems. They’re good for marking out the space, and be used as edging. That helps deal with the problem of plants flopping over.
And while a small garden full of shrubs could feel ‘hemmed in’, grasses are airy and transparent. ‘If you plant ornamental grasses, you get structure, foliage and seedheads. And they don’t get diseases.’
His favourite grasses for a low-maintenance garden are Carex ‘Evergreen’, Stipa tenuissima and Calamagrostis ‘Karl Foerster’.
Another garden designer who uses grasses is Michael McCoy. He says that it’s often a good idea to pick deciduous grasses over evergreen ones, because deciduous ones go brown and keep their shape in winter. Then you cut them to the ground in spring. Evergreen grasses can be more fiddly to comb out.
Michael specialises in naturalistic planting design, which uses plants which grow easily where you live, so they’re easy to look after.
Avoid annuals (bedding plants) for an easy-care garden.
A friend of mine recently described herself as a ‘garden owner rather than a gardener.’ She wants to spend her time in the garden relaxing and enjoying it, not working.
But she wants her garden to look as stylish as her house, and for the colours to link up. In May she buys bedding plants, then she feeds, waters and dead-heads them over the summer. In September she digs them up.
Lee says he never designs around annuals unless a client particularly wants him to. Annuals are the highest maintenance plants, he says, because they need growing from seed or purchase as young plants. Then they need to be planted, protected from pests and diseases, dead-headed and then dug up.
Shrubs, grasses and perennials are all low-maintenance compared to annuals.
Reduce the number of different plants and cultivars
Reduce the number of species if you’re planting perennials for the time-poor gardener, advises Lee. Firstly he draws up an initial plant list for a garden. Then he reduces the number of different species of plant by about a third. ‘Groups of plants look good in bold blocks of colour, and if you have a few tatty plants, it’s less likely to show,’ he says.
‘People often say they want a cottage-garden style, but that they also want it to be low-maintenance. But a cottage garden style with lots of different plants is a lot more work ‘
Lee’s top low-maintenance perennials include geums and geraniums. Both fill awkward corners because they ‘don’t mind a bit of shade’. And ‘if you chop them back in summer, you’ll get two flushes of colour from them.’
These are my Aster amellus ‘King George’. I don’t even dead-head them because their dried flower heads look good in the winter garden.
His recommendations for low-maintenance plants include salvias and the tough daisy-like flowers of the Aster family. (Asters were recently divided into Asters and Symphyotricum – see my post on botanical plant names for an explanation).
And although I think we rarely see them in show gardens, he also rates Mahonia, astilbe and fuschias as good low-maintenance plants.
My Aster amellus ‘King George’ singing its song with seedheads in the garden in winter.
Don’t leave gaps
There is a certain style of gardening where plants are spaced out carefully and you can see earth between the plants. However, Lee says that will encourage weeds. ‘Pack plants in – you can always thin them if it gets over-crowded. It’ll discourage weeds’ (which means less weeding).
He also says that paths are easier to maintain if you plant right up to them. ‘Don’t leave a gap between the path and the border,’ he says. Every gap can fill with weeds.
Lee Burkhill’s Garden Ninja garden design company is based in the Manchester area and you can also find him on Twitter.
And Lee’s excellent Garden Ninja YouTube channel has practical gardening advice, some specially aimed at beginner gardeners, plus ‘before-and-after’ garden makeover videos (don’t we all love a ‘before-and-after’?).
Low maintenance pots and more…
For the best low maintenance plants for pots, see here.
And holiday homes really need low maintenance gardens, because holidaymakers won’t want to garden. Or even if they do, they may not be there at the right time. Yet it’s so important to have a beautiful and relaxing garden in a holiday home. See how garden designer Posy Gentles created the perfect low maintenance garden for some holiday barns in 10 low maintenance plants for instant garden success.
Front gardens are so important. They welcome you home and create those vital first impressions for guests. So if you’d like a low maintenance front garden, see this post on low maintenance front gardens – the myths and the truths.
And, surprisingly, I found that growing a whole border of wildflowers was low maintenance. You do have to read the instructions on the packet (and this post on how to grow wildflowers in a pot, border or meadow will also help!). A packet of wildflower seeds is a very cheap way or filling a border. And some wildflower mixes will give you months of colour.
And rewilding your garden is another approach to low maintenance gardening. It’s important to note that this doesn’t mean simply leaving your garden to sort itself out. You will just get overgrown with one or two weeds or thugs. But read this post on Serena Schellenberg’s Rewilded Garden for tips on how to make gardening easier and less pressured.
More low-maintenance plants on YouTube
I call low-maintenance plants ‘my plant heroes’ and I’ve done two videos on them for The Middlesized Garden YouTube channel. The first one is here.
There is a ‘garden tour’ video of the garden every month. I noticed that some plants cropped up again and again. They either looked good for an exceptionally long time or in two seasons.
It was only when I’d finished making several videos that I also realised that these plants were also the easiest plants in the garden to care for. Here they are: The second video is here.
Shop my favourite gardening books, tools and products
I’m often asked for recommendations, such as good gardening tools and books. So to make it easy for people to find the books, tools and gardening products I like best, I’ve put together some lists on The Middlesized Garden Amazon store.
For example, if you’re looking for a gardening book to give as a present, here is my list of favourite gardening books.
Links to Amazon are affiliate, see disclosure. If you buy, I may get a small fee, but it doesn’t affect the price you pay. And I only recommend things I use myself!
Pin to remember low maintenance plants:
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So pleased to find your site. I am starting out on a new garden and want low maintenance planting that fits in with a modern design. I had some ideas on what I wanted but after reading this have changed my mind. I definitely like the idea of grasses but have got large areas of raised beds. Would they work with evergreen shrubs behind and grasses with a few spring bulbs in front.
It’s difficult to say, but you can plant any plant in raised beds, and you can treat raised bed design the same as planning an ordinary garden bed, so it should work. I find that raised beds drain more than beds on the ground do, so it may be worth considering plants that don’t need too much watering when filling them.
I so enjoy seeing and hearing you on my tablet, always interesting items, and lifts the spirits during this lockdown time. Many thanks Ann
Thank you!
Thank you for the wonderful monthly garden tours. I have found them helpful. Please enjoy another successful year in your garden.
Thank you so much!