Some people revel in growing complicated landscapes with hard-to-grow plants. Most people, in contrast, want a landscape that doesn’t consume too much time, money, and chemicals.
Low Maintenance Defined
All plants require some routine care to stay alive. Low-maintenance landscapes make use of native plants that are adapted to the rainfall, temperature, and soil conditions in the landscape. Once established, these plants only need watering in a drought and need minimal fertilizer or pesticides to stay healthy.
Establishing Plants
When growing living things, the first year for perennials, and up to the third year for trees, are critical. Your plants will need supplemental water during these years as they work to grow roots that can reach water deep in the soil and all around them. Failure to water will doom your plants. Not only is that hard on the plants, it wastes your time and money and can lower your curb appeal.
Inventory Current Plants
Very few people buy or otherwise acquire a landscape with nothing living on it. Most landscapes have at least a few plants. The first step in developing a low maintenance landscape is to inventory the plants that are already there. Draw a scale drawing of your landscape. Put the permanent features such as telephone poles, buildings, and water features like ponds or streams.
Next, walk around and write down each plant, including trees or weeds, you have. You should make a list that contains the location number (for transfer to your scale drawing), plant name, if known, and the plant’s condition (dead, growing well, struggling).
Keep in mind that most plants go dormant in the winter. Many plants also go dormant if the temperature is very hot in an attempt to conserve water. I like to take an inventory each fall to see what plants look nice, what is struggling, and what didn’t make it through the heat of summer. You can do the inventory at any time but may have to wait for spring or fall to see if the plant is alive and dormant instead of dead.
Site Analysis
As you take your plant inventory, notice the areas with low spots, boggy spots, high spots, and dry spots. Check the sunlight each spot receives throughout the day. All of these factors may change depending on the season, but you can get a rough idea of different environmental factors in the landscape. For example, you may have an area that is always wet. You would plant something like blue lobelia there, while you would put something like purple coneflower in a dryer, exposed area.
Plan in Small Steps
Don’t worry about yanking out your entire existing landscape and starting over. Most people do not have the desire or the money to do that. Plan the renovation of your landscape in logical steps rather than all at once.
You may choose a particular flower bed to tackle first, or to remove some of your lawn. Use your plant list and condition to decide what needs the most immediate help and what can wait.
Use your budget and the condition of your plants to come up with a five-year plan, or ten-year plan. If you have the resources, you might spread the renovation over only one or two years. in that case, you may want to list each landscape feature in the order you want to renovate it.
Principles of Low Maintenance Landscapes
When planning your landscape renovations, there are some principles to remember if you want a low maintenance landscape. Some conflict between aesthetics and workload is required so your landscape looks nice even though it is low maintenance.
Simplicity
Complicated landscapes with lots of statues, fountains, and other features require a lot of maintenance. It takes time to mow between and around these items. Try to plan any permanent features so that they are easy to care for. Fountains, for example, can take a lot of maintenance to look nice and keep flowing.
Include a variety of plants with different sizes and shapes but do not overcrowd the landscape. Group plants into beds. Pick plants with similar water requirements for each landscape bed. Make each plant earn its keep with some reason for wanting it, such as attractive foliage, food for pollinators, or long-lasting blooms.
