The Best Low Maintenance Landscaping Ideas UK
Tired of working hard each week only to have a lawn and plants to tend to on the weekend? Maybe the prospect of gardening sounds like all work, no play. Whatever the reason, you can keep your time for more pleasurable pursuits by choosing low-maintenance landscaping ideas.
In this article, we’ll explore 33 of the best low-maintenance landscaping ideas. You’ll find plant recommendations aplenty, alongside simple landscaping hacks, so you can create a garden that wows with minimal effort.
1. Low-Maintenance Landscaping Ideas for Front of House
Want a front garden that stuns yet is simple to maintain? If that’s the case, you’ll need to combine plants with low watering needs and some stylish stones. One showy plant that’s perfect for a UK front garden is the allium – it’s long-lived, flowers for months, and requires next-to-no maintenance!
2. Plant-Free Landscaping Ideas
What better way to reduce your need for maintenance than with plant-free landscaping? While this example isn’t exactly plant-free, it brings the need for gardening right down by installing a large, tiered decking. The dark wood echos the natural surrounding landscape, and cleverly-positioned planters still give the greenery that every garden needs.
3. Low Maintenance Front Yard Plants
Let’s face it – our front yard is mostly just for show. We don’t tend to spend a massive amount of time staring at our front door, but we still want our home’s exterior to sing. Adding stylish containers like these minimalist, modern black planters does the trick. Fill them with low-maintenance succulents, and you’re in for a treat!
4. Cheap Landscaping Ideas
Although we wish we did, we don’t usually have unlimited funds to throw at our gardens. Luckily, you don’t need to if you buy a few beautiful boxwood shrubs. Boxwoods are cheap and cheerful, giving your garden a sculptured look with minimal maintenance. They’re slow-growing plants, so cut them back once a year between May and August.
5. Low-Maintenance Landscaping Ideas for Small Yards
When working with a tight garden space, it can feel like your options are limited. However, you can still do plenty of things – take this design. They’ve incorporated wooden steps, which you could easily make out of pallet wood if you’re on a budget, a simple table and chairs set, and a mostly bare space sprinkled with some stone slabs and pleasing greenery.
6. Rock Landscaping Ideas
Looking for an ultra-modern style to suit a current home? This design has bucket-loads of modern minimalism, with stunning black hardcore against the warming orange shade of contemporary fencing. Add some drought-tolerant plants like cacti, snake plants and palms, and you’ve got some great landscaping.
7. Simple Small Front Yard Landscaping Ideas That Are Low Maintenance
This simple flower bed packs a punch in a small space. With five different hosta varieties and a beautiful blossom tree, you get variety in colour, leaf shape, texture, and style. To finish the look, encase this in a straightforward stone border.
8. Low Maintenance Side Yard Ideas
When generating landscaping ideas, many people forget about the side of the house! Don’t worry; it won’t cost you an arm and a leg to include your side yard. Why not try bamboo and some coal-colored stones for an Asian-inspired side garden?
9. Landscaping Ideas for Backyard
Verticality is integral to garden landscaping, especially if you’re working with a small space. If floor space is an issue, this wall-mounted planter stuffed with succulents provides the perfect solution. Make sure to add some trailing plants like string of pearls, ivy, or lobelia.
10. Country Landscaping Ideas
An English cottage garden is only complete with the right plants. So, what’s it to be? You can’t go wrong with a foxglove or two, hollyhocks, daisies, peonies, lupines, and irises for a country garden.
11. Modern Backyard Ideas
Is modern your kind of style? Luckily for you, a contemporary design sits hand-in-hand with low-maintenance landscaping. Just look at this – no grass to mow and only a few shrubs to keep an eye on. A sleek, concrete planter containing manicured boxwoods and laurel trees is the perfect accompaniment to a modern style.
12. Low-Maintenance Yard Cover
Covering your whole garden in greenery can be time-consuming and costly, not to mention difficult to keep under control. But ground cover plants offer a happy medium – they fill all the cracks, leaving no gaps for weeds, without getting too out of control. Give creeping Jenny, clover, chamomile, or creeping thyme a go.
13. Low Maintenance Garden Border Ideas
Knowing what to put in a garden border can be challenging, especially if you’re looking for low-maintenance solutions. However, while this design requires some initial hard graft, it pays off – look at these funky curved borders! They create eye-catching contrast from the straight paving stones. And, filled with chives, these beds offer a culinary hand.
14. Inexpensive Low-Maintenance Landscaping Ideas
Low-maintenance landscaping can be as inexpensive as you like! Stones have the benefit of falling within a tight budget, and there’s a wealth of options to choose from, so you’re bound to find a type you like, whatever your style! Check out the stark contrast between these white stones and the fleshy green leaves of the array of succulents.
15. Low-Maintenance Landscaping Ideas for Large Yards
With a large yard, you have to deal with more grass, more plants, and more furniture. Just more, more, more. But just because your garden is more significant in size doesn’t mean it has to take away hours of your time attempting to tame it. Striking the right balance between paving, furniture, plants, and mulch ensures you can keep your large yard low maintenance.
16. Landscaping Ideas With Artificial Grass
Artificial grass is a go-to if you aren’t keen on the idea of mowing a lawn. And if there’s one thing people forget, it’s that grass doesn’t have to only act as ground cover; it can bring an interesting textural element to a side garden wall! This artificial grass wall brings some warmth to the dark stone behind it.
17. Low Maintenance Landscaping Ideas for Slopes
Planting on slopes is a little trickier but by no means impossible. In fact, planting on slopes has several benefits – the plants’ roots reinforce soil composition, preventing erosion. It also gives you an awesome layered look without needing a multi-level planter! Here are some top tips: add terracing to slow water runoff, use groundcover plants to reinforce the soil to the max, and stick to smaller plants at the bottom and bigger shrubs at the top.
18. Low Maintenance Landscaping Along Fences
There’s no need for a fence to be purely functional. You can incorporate it into your garden landscaping if you choose the right plants to sit in front of it. Climbing plants like clematis and honeysuckle are excellent along fences because they add verticality to your garden design. If you’re sticking to shrubs, hydrangeas are a no-brainer. Or, for natural screening, choose a cherry laurel or photinia.
19. Low Maintenance Flowering Shrubs
Flowering shrubs are classic of any English garden, so if you choose any of these, you’ll be in good company. Ceanothus is a British staple, alongside Japanese dogwood, rock rose, and Fuschia. The explosion of blue blooms ceanothus sports will attract wildlife in droves, so it’s the perfect choice if you want to keep the bees and butterflies at the heart of your design.
20. Incorporate Potted Plants in Your Landscaping Ideas
Roses, camellias, agapanthus, and dwarf buddleia make excellent low-maintenance potted plants. And if you’re looking for tree recommendations, take a look at this olive tree! While olive trees are relatively drought-tolerant, they will need regular watering if you want them to flower and produce fruit. If that sounds like too much hassle, try a dwarf fruit tree, bay laurel, or magnolia tree.
21. Celebrate Perennials in Your Low-Maintenance Garden
If there’s one thing about perennials, it’s that the hardy kind requires almost no maintenance. Hoorah! Consider daylily, Russian sage, hellebore, sedum, and coneflowers for an easy-to-maintain perennial paradise. You won’t need to replace your perennials each year like annuals, their roots will improve your soil’s structure, and they extract plenty of moisture from the earth so don’t require frequent watering.
22. Choose Native Plants for Your Garden
When you choose native plants, you can’t go far wrong because these plants thrive in your precise climate. This has many benefits, mainly because they require little intervention. Within this design, you’ll find the beautiful goat’s beard, a perennial that produces striking cream-coloured blooms in summer. Other hardy natives include the alpine aster, tickseed, cranesbill, and even strawberry!
23. Add Low-Maintenance Evergreens to Your Landscaping Ideas
Evergreens are a go-to when prioritising low maintenance because they look good all year round and, once established, require very little intervention. Bamboo, bay, daphne, and yucca are some of the best for the job.
24. Create an Exotic, Low-Maintenance Garden With Succulents
With succulents, you’ll find a variety of colours, shapes, textures, and incredible, exotic flowers that no other plant species can replicate. They can handle most soil types as long as it has good drainage – their roots don’t like to sit in water! Their low-care needs make them the perfect choice for a low-maintenance, resilient garden. The most easy-care exotic succulents are aloe, agave, echeveria, and crassula.
25. Best Low-Maintenance Tree Species
When it comes to low-maintenance trees, shopping native is your best bet. Alder, blackthorn, dog rose, and silver birches are all worthy contenders. While these trees are relatively easy to care for, they need watering during summer. If you still want to incorporate these stunning trees in your low-maintenance garden, try installing a simple irrigation system (more on this later!).
26. Try Simple Water Features in Your Low-Maintenance Garden
Water features are undoubtedly beautiful, becoming the ideal focal point in any landscaping design. What’s more, they require next-to-no maintenance once you set them up! They also don’t have to break the bank, as plenty of DIY water feature options exist. So, go nuts!
27. Use Flower Power to Create a Low-Maintenance Garden That Wows
Creating a garden that wows even when you’re using no effort to maintain it requires specific flower species. You’ll need plants that aren’t fussy about their growing conditions and ones that bloom for long periods. Need some help? Here are some of the best:
- Balloon flower
- Hydrangeas
- Clematis
- Black-eyed Susan
- New England Aster
- Yarrow
28. Add a Wildlife-Friendly Low-Maintenance Lawn Alternative
Who has the time or energy to drag a lawnmower out once a week anymore? Clover, chamomile, and creeping thyme are all excellent low-maintenance lawn alternatives that won’t require mowing. You could also consider a mixture of plants commonly used for green rooves, such as a combination of crested dog’s tail, red campion, red clover, oxeye daisy, and sorrel.
29. Give Weed Barriers a Go in Your Low-Maintenance Landscaping
One nuisance that will keep you working on your garden long after you want to is weeds. Weeds can quickly take over a garden, even a low-maintenance one! So, the first step to creating a garden that’s easy to maintain is laying down a weed membrane. You can check out the weed membranes we recommend here.
30. Go Green With Low-Maintenance Hostas
Gardeners prize hostas mainly for their foliage. What people often overlook is their glorious flowers – they typically bloom in the warm summer months. Hostas clump together, forming a mound that makes them perfect for containers and borders alike. Check out the ‘El Niño,’
‘Frosted Mouse Ears’ and ‘Love Pat’ varieties for some truly unique, low-maintenance plants.
31. Add an Easy Irrigation System
Installing an irrigation system now will benefit the future you no end. Not only will you not have to water your plants, but you can look after greenery with specific watering needs with ease! And it doesn’t take much to install an irrigation system – just remove sod, pull your polyethylene pipe through the ground, secure your pipes with fittings, install a swing pipe, and ensure you stay clear of any mains!
32. Bring Self-Seeding Plants Into the Mix
Self-seeding plants make your garden work on autopilot. They even celebrate neglect, doing far better the less you touch them! You can enjoy a lifetime of beautiful blooms by purchasing just one packet of self-seeders. Some of the top self-seeders to use in the UK are:
- Alchemilla mollis
- Alliums
- Foxgloves
- Erigeron
- Borage
- Aquilegia vulgaris
- Marigolds
33. Take a Natural Approach to Pests in Your Low-Maintenance Garden Design
Encouraging birds, bees, and butterflies in your garden is a surefire way to reduce the risk of pests invading and ruining your low-maintenance garden. Alternatively, you can plant strategically, dotting aromatics that deter pests throughout your garden design. Some of the best for the job are basil, chives, lavender, mint, bay, garlic, and rosemary.
Get Gardening…Or Not?
Gardening doesn’t always have to be such hard work – you can make it easy on yourself. How you do this is up to you – bring in no-maintenance elements like faux grass, decking, or xeriscaping, or only incorporate plants that do most of the hard work for you, such as drought-tolerant plants, self-seeders, and wildlife-friendly greenery.
What simple steps are you going to take to guarantee a low-maintenance landscape?
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