What Makes a Garden Low Maintenance?
Discussing maintenance needs with new clients can be tricky.
As an exuberant supporter of native plants and a lover of greenspace, I want to sell people gardens. I want to convince them to fill their landscape with native shrubs and perennials and groundcovers until every inch of their yard is bursting with vibrant life. And, for most of my clients, they want that too. They want to imagine themselves as the folks with the incredible yard.
But there’s a pernicious white lie that circulates around the horticulture world perpetuated by native plant evangelists who are (like myself) sometimes just a little too desperate to see more ecological gardens planted.
That native plant gardens are inherently low maintenance.
The truth is- and I think I’ve gotten pretty good at saying this- there’s just about nothing more low maintenance you can put in your yard than turf grass. If you don’t fertilize it, don’t worry about weeds, mow it once a week, you’re in the clear. Yard work to-do list checked! If you want a truly low maintenance yard, this is what you actually want.
But I’m assuming that when people say they want a low maintenance native plant garden, what they want is something that is a joy to work in.
Something that draws them out into the garden, not with chemicals and gas-powered equipment, but with curiosity and an extra hour or two to piddle around. That’s how I spend most of my time maintaining my garden- just piddling. Pulling weeds here and there, noticing this and that, editing where needed, breaking a sweat when I have to. It’s not no maintenance, it just doesn’t feel as much like a chore.
So, if you’re willing to accept the responsibility of SOME maintenance, the lowest maintenance native plant garden I could probably offer someone would be a pocket prairie style matrix of site-appropriate grasses and wildflowers. You would have to mow it a few times in the first season, then once a year after that. You may want to familiarize yourself with the most common noxious weeds and be on the lookout to hand pull what doesn’t belong. And you may have to be willing to edit slightly after a few years- like one couple I know, whose meadow became nothing but Indian grass by year five. (Or, if you like Indian grass, you could just accept that as your signature plant.)
A much higher maintenance garden is the more traditional cottage-style pollinator garden. Perennials jostle for space in deep, lush borders filled to the brim. A garden like this may need pruned periodically, it may need watered, it will certainly need edited and weeded. This style of garden is for a person who wants to spend a lot of their time in the garden. It’s my personal favorite style, but it does require a certain level of commitment. I encourage anyone who asks me to design gardens like this for them to be honest about their lifestyle and the time they can devote to upkeep.
It's true that certain parts of a native plant garden are guaranteed to be lower maintenance than a traditional landscape.
If you don’t like raking leaves, good news, the ecological benefits of leaving them in your flower beds are overwhelming. Same with deadheading- that’s very rarely necessary in a native garden. New research even supports skipping “spring cleanup” entirely if you can get away with it. (I still do some spring cleaning in my yard for appearance’s sake.) And if you have the space in your yard to allow plants to sucker and spread, they will fill in naturally to create those lush beds you’re picturing in your mind. Also, if you plant correctly for your site conditions, you will rarely need to water after the first season, and you’ll never need to till or fertilize. Spraying pests is out too- encouraging biodiversity helps nature find its own balance.
However, you may battle deer and other hungry mammals. You may also need to do some strategic pruning and staking to keep everything bushy and upright. And I still encourage you to keep clean edges and a fresh layer of mulch around your front borders. The weeds will always grow. You will have to pull weeds. There may be less over time, but they will always be there.
A garden is a living thing. You can’t snap your fingers and have a static vignette to admire all year.
You have to get out into, experience it, explore it, learn it. If you plant it and abandon it, you’ll end up with a monster on your hands. Growing a garden is a commitment to nurturing life beyond your own, to becoming rooted in a place long term. It’s a beautiful and sacred sacrifice. But it’s not automatically low maintenance.
