Low-maintenance gardening

For a low maintenance garden follow these tips which I’ve found helpful over my gardening career to save me time and effort, when it’s needed.

Here’s an important caveat though. I’m talking ‘low maintenance’ here and not ‘no-maintenance’. No-maintenance would mean no living plants at all and everything hard landscaped. That the garden is all hard-landscaping is certainly a possibility but it’s not my idea of a living garden.

If you’re interested in lush and living plants in your garden though that are low-maintenance, read on.

There are ways to make a garden less needy as far as labour’s concerned

• Choose evergreen shrubs instead of annuals and perennials

• Get happy with the presence of weeds (they are actually wildflowers after all).

Some weeds/wildflowers look effective en-masse like willowherb or ragwort and can form part of the palette of colour in your garden.

• Accept that low maintenance means a small degree of gardening - and choose the bits you like. This could be browsing your favourite catalogues, or smelling the roses!

• Leave seed heads on flowering plants once they go brown. They can look attractive in winter and even provide handy homes for insects like ladybirds and butterflies.

• Plant shrubs native to the UK. They’re likely to get fewer pests and disease in a climate that suits them - and fewer problems means less time troubleshooting.

• Get a skilled gardener on board to take care of the timely tasks throughout the year. This will keep your plants thriving and looking their best, if you’re busy and have other priorities that need seeing to.

Here are some suggestions of excellent shrubs to have in your garden, for low-maintenance which’ll offer you colour and visual interest all year round. 

Dogwood Cornus

A colourful shrub that, although loses its leaves in winter, reveals bright red, yellow or green stems to brighten up your space through the darker months. Makes an excellent waist-to-head height plant for the border, even borders that only get semi-shade.

Low maintenance requirement: Cut all stems back in March to ankle-height.

Oleaster Elaeagnus

This evergreen shrub's as hardy as a holly but without the anti-social spikes. All-year-round you have the lovely leaves and round about November a flush of little white flowers which smell great as you walk past.

Low maintenance requirement: Snip back the occasional stem that has had a growth-spurt.

Pittosporum 

In a sheltered spot Pittosporums give you lush green or purple wavy leaves on shrubs that are nice and compact. They're evergreen and look great when nearby bulbs like crocus and daffodils start to emerge.

Low maintenance requirement: Water when we're having a bout of sunny weather. In East Yorkshire this isn't too frequent so not something you need to be too vigilant about.

Butterfly bush Buddleya

So long as you have a sunny spot a butterfly bush will either thrive or at least hold on, flowering in even the poorest, gravelly soil. The flowers in summer are scented and attractive to butterflies and now butterfly bushes come in all sizes from miniatures for the patio or tall varieties for the back of the border.

Low maintenance requirement: In April or May cut all stems back to a leaf sprouting from the trunk anywhere from knee to waist-height.

Sweet box Sarcococca

This evergreen shrub has all the attributes of a regular box plant, but is less prone to disease and drought and has the most alluringly-scented flowers right through late winter. The leaves are nice and shiny right through the year and the little white flowers turn to attractive red or black berries in the spring.

Low maintenance requirement: In April trim shrubs like you would a box, neatly or in a nice-shape like a ball or cone.