"Can we have a low-maintenance garden?"
It must be one of the most common requests we hear when designing a garden.
It's also a perfectly reasonable one. Most people don't want to spend every weekend mowing, weeding, pruning, feeding, pressure washing and generally fighting with their garden.
The problem is, I'm not entirely convinced a genuinely low-maintenance garden exists.
There are certainly gardens that require less maintenance. There are gardens designed to make maintenance easier. And there are definitely gardens that demand far too much work. But a beautiful garden that simply looks after itself?
I've yet to find one.
Perhaps We're Asking the Wrong Question
When someone says they want a low-maintenance garden, one of the first things we really need to establish is what they actually mean by maintenance.
Do they hate mowing the lawn? Do they not want to prune shrubs? Are they away with work a lot? Do they enjoy gardening but don't want to spend hours weeding? Or are they simply looking for a garden that still looks good if they ignore it for a couple of weeks?
Those are completely different design briefs, and they deserve completely different solutions.
Perhaps instead of asking, "Do you want a low-maintenance garden?" we should be asking, "How much time do you realistically want to spend looking after it?"
That's a far more useful conversation.
Everything Outdoors Requires Maintenance
This is probably the inconvenient truth.
Put anything outside in the North West of England and, sooner or later, it's going to need attention. Paving gets dirty, decking needs cleaning, gravel moves, drains collect debris and fences weather. Lighting fittings need checking, water features need cleaning, hedges grow and trees become larger than they were on planting day.
Even the supposedly maintenance-free parts of a garden aren't actually maintenance free.
Hard Landscaping Isn't a Magic Solution
One response to requests for low maintenance has traditionally been to remove as many plants as possible. More paving. More gravel. More hard surfaces. Fewer borders.
Technically, that might reduce certain gardening jobs.
But I'm not convinced it necessarily creates a better garden.
Large areas of hard landscaping come with their own maintenance list. Porcelain still gets dirty, pointing still needs looking after, leaves still accumulate and algae doesn't look at an expensive patio and decide to grow somewhere cheaper.
You haven't eliminated maintenance.
You've simply changed the type of maintenance.
What About Artificial Grass?
Artificial grass is probably the classic example.
It's often sold as a low-maintenance alternative to a lawn, and compared with mowing every week through the growing season, there's an obvious argument. But somewhere along the way, "low maintenance" became "no maintenance."
They're not the same thing.
Artificial grass still collects leaves, moss, dust and organic matter. It needs brushing, weeds can establish around the edges, pets create another maintenance issue entirely and eventually the material itself reaches the end of its useful life.
Whether artificial grass is appropriate is another debate, but it illustrates the wider point perfectly.
Reducing one maintenance job doesn't eliminate maintenance altogether.
Plants Aren't Necessarily the Problem
This is where I think garden design sometimes goes wrong.
A client asks for low maintenance, so we dramatically reduce the planting. But the problem isn't necessarily having plants—it's having the wrong plants in the wrong places.
A badly designed border can become an enormous amount of work. Shrubs outgrow their space, perennials flop across paths, plants struggle because the soil or light is wrong and bare soil becomes a permanent invitation for weeds.
You spend your life trying to persuade plants to live somewhere they don't particularly want to be.
That's high-maintenance planting.
The Right Plant in the Right Place Still Matters
It's an old horticultural phrase because it's true.
Choose plants that suit the soil, aspect, exposure and available space and you've already removed a surprising amount of unnecessary work.
A shrub that naturally reaches the size you need is much easier than planting something enormous and cutting it back twice a year. Dense planting helps suppress weeds, ground-cover plants occupy the space weeds would otherwise claim and well-designed borders often become easier to manage as they mature rather than more difficult.
That's very different from trying to create a maintenance-free garden.
It's designing unnecessary maintenance out wherever we reasonably can.
Lawns Aren't Always the Villain
Lawns receive a lot of criticism whenever low-maintenance gardens are discussed.
Yes, a perfect striped lawn can require considerable work. But for some gardens, mowing a reasonably sized lawn once a week is actually easier than maintaining the alternative.
Replace it with a complicated gravel garden and you'll still have work to do. Replace it with paving and you'll still clean it. Replace it with intricate planting and you'll still manage the plants.
Sometimes the simplest solution really is grass.
Again, it depends entirely on the client.
Gardens Are Alive
This is perhaps what separates gardens from almost every other part of the home.
We can draw a garden precisely. We can specify every plant, every tree and every paving slab. But the moment it's built, nature starts having its own ideas.
Plants grow. Trees cast more shade. Roots spread. Some plants thrive far more than expected while others quietly disappear.
The garden we build today won't be exactly the same garden in five years' time.
Personally, I think that's one of the best things about gardens.
But it does mean they require management.
We're designing with something that's alive.
A Mature Garden Shouldn't Become Harder Work
That doesn't mean we should accept endless maintenance.
Quite the opposite.
One of the signs of a well-designed garden is that it becomes increasingly settled. Plants fill their allocated spaces, tree canopies develop, ground becomes covered and the planting begins regulating itself to some extent.
There will still be pruning, cutting back, mowing and seasonal jobs.
There shouldn't be a constant battle between the garden and the person looking after it.
If there is, something probably isn't working.
Perhaps We Should Talk About 'Manageable Maintenance'
I think this is a much better phrase.
A garden should be designed around the amount of maintenance its owner is genuinely prepared to undertake.
For one person, that might mean spending every Sunday outside. For somebody else, it means employing a gardener once a fortnight. Another client might want four seasonal visits each year, while somebody else genuinely wants to do almost nothing.
All of those are valid.
But they should produce different gardens.
The important thing is being realistic at the design stage.
Maintenance Should Be Designed Into the Garden
We think carefully about where a terrace goes. We think about drainage, lighting and the view from the kitchen window.
Perhaps we should think just as carefully about how the finished garden will actually be maintained.
Can you get a mower to the lawn?
Can somebody reach the hedge safely?
How will leaves be removed from that gravel?
What happens when that tree doubles in size?
Who is actually going to look after the planting?
These aren't particularly glamorous questions.
Five years after the photographs have been taken, they become rather important.
So Does a Low-Maintenance Garden Exist?
I'd say it depends what we mean.
A no-maintenance garden?
No.
A beautiful outdoor space will always require some attention.
But a garden intelligently designed around the client's lifestyle, using appropriate materials, sensible planting and maintenance considered from the very beginning?
Absolutely.
Perhaps that's what we should have been selling all along.
Not the mythical maintenance-free garden.
A garden whose maintenance is proportionate to the enjoyment you get from it.
That seems a much better deal.