Installing a low-maintenance garden allows you to really enjoy your time spent tending the trees, shrubs and lawn that make up your landscaping. How do you actually achieve this? Plant selection is a great place to begin.
Choose plants that are drought tolerant, require no staking, need deadheading only once per year and are cut back once in the spring (e.g. ornamental grasses) or once in the fall (e.g. perennials such as hosta).
Low Maintenance Flowers for Every Season
Spring flowering plants:
Daffodil planting in cluster
Daffodils. Narcissus are a great addition to any garden border or container. They can be left to naturalize in the garden, reproducing themselves year after year for a continual supply of spring flowering bulbs.
Vancouveria. Barrenwort is a delicately flowered plant, perfect for spots in the dry shade. Think about those foresty spots under a big ancient cedar, and you’ve got the perfect place for Vancouveria.
Summer flowering plants:
Echinacea White Swan
Echinacea. Coneflower now comes in a range of colours. Originally a magenta pink, they are now white, orange, red, pink or purple, with some interesting flower forms also available. A sturdy perennial that will beautify any hot, dry spot. Echinacea does not require staking, or deadheading, and leaving the cone to dry adds an interesting texture to your garden beds.
Similar perennials: Rudbeckia (Black eyed Susan)
Lavender English Nana
Lavender: Purple or white fragrant flowers atop a mass of gray-green foliage. Loves to grow in dry, poor soil.
Late Summer and Fall Flowering plants:
Sedum. A lovely succulent plant that comes in many different forms. Cute little trailing types with yellow flowers or tall upright clumps of thick-fleshed leaves with masses of shocking pink flowers on top. A great plant for late summer colour that is easy to care for.
More Gardening Tips to Make Your Garden an Easy-Care Landscape
Water your garden beds deeply once per week. Long, sturdy roots that have to reach deeply into the soil for water not only create a healthy plant, but they hold water longer during summer drought periods.
The City of Vancouver Grow Natural program offers the following recommendations:
· Water thoroughly but infrequently. Over-watering and constant shallow watering can lead to disease, leach nutrients from the soil and waste water. Too much water creates shallow roots that make lawns and gardens more susceptible to pests and heat stress.
· Water about 2.5 centimetres a week (about an hour) in warm weather. Watering in the early morning reduces evaporation.
Applying a layer of mulch to your garden has to be one of the most time- and cost-effective things you can do in your garden. Bark mulch is actually partially decomposed bark that can be chunky or ground up to a fine texture. The colour ranges from orange to black to suit everyone’s tastes. The benefits of using bark mulch are many: it reduces weeds; it conserves water; it provides nutrients as it further decomposes. Bark mulch truly makes any garden low-maintenance. By conserving water, and reducing evaporation during hot summer months, bark mulch works in conjunction with your watering to keep plants happy and healthy.
Read more about Garden Reno services and how we can help you install an easy care garden in your yard.