A low maintenance garden – my top tips
This is a collaborative post.
If you follow me on social media or have seen some of my recent posts you will know we have recently moved house. I absolutely love the new house and garden and am so excited to hopefully share it with you properly soon. In the meantime, we have been sorting the garden out so that it is as low maintenance as possible as I really am not the most green-fingered person out there and can kill a cactus!
Low maintenance garden ideas
Depending on your garden, your lifestyle and how you plan to use your space these ideas may help you when thinking of low maintenance garden ideas.
- Slow-growing shrubs that need trimming once a year.
- A lawn – if you have one full of weeds consider starting afresh and returning it.
- Areas of patio and/or pebbles – this can be as cheap or expensive-looking as you wish. I would recommend basic gravel for large areas and then smaller areas or borders of lovely decorative stone to really set it off. There is a great variety at Stones 4 Gardens if you fancy a browse. I love the look of the white gravel and then using the black polished pebbles in pots or small borders. I might do that for an area of our back garden.
- Artificial grass – all it needs is a brush or hoover every now and then! Get rid of the lawnmower for good!
- Bark instead of gravel can work well in borders but requires a little more maintenance than gravel.
- Install concrete retaining walls. Concrete walls are durable, long-lasting, and require little maintenance. They can withstand harsh weather conditions and don’t require regular painting or staining.
Our new garden before we changed it
In our previous home, we had the garden changed a few years ago to artificial grass and a patio which was perfect for low maintenance we are looking to do similar to our back garden here but for now, we have worked on the front garden. Did you read the article I wrote about changing our old back garden?
Our front garden in the new house was grass with some borders which were overgrown and contained lots of plants and shrubs that would need to be cared for and trimmed as needed throughout the year. It also has an ornamental cherry tree and a large Christmas tree that someone planted years ago and has grown well!
The changes we made to our new front garden
We have decided to have the trees trimmed so they are not as tall and unruly and block a little less light out. The lovely tree surgeon we found did a fabulous job and also does gardening work.
He has changed the borders a bit for us and removed and cut back some of the plants so they are much more manageable and have ornamental stones in to look nice and keep the weeds away!
All the shrubs have been cut back so they look a lot tidier and the grass that was more weeds than grass is now gravel!
I absolutely love it and went to the garden centre the other day and bought some plant pots, stepping stones, compost and plants and have dotted them over the gravel to break it up with some colour!
I have chosen lilies and lavender. Lavender reminds me of my grandma so that will always make me smile.
Do you have any recommendations of anything that would grow nicely up the trellis? That area gets sun from around 2 pm onwards and is reasonably sheltered from the wind. Any ideas are appreciated as long as they are easy to keep alive!
Is your garden low maintenance or do you love gardening? If you are a big gardening fan do check out my article on how many calories you can burn whilst gardening, it will surprise you!