How to Design a Low Maintenance Garden
I may have lured you to this blog post under false pretenses, because I don’t believe in low-maintenance gardens.
Most “low-maintenance” solutions are either short term fixes that will become difficult to care for down the road, are very expensive to install, or may have significant environmental impacts (I’m looking at you astroturf). Instead, I’m going to invite you to reframe maintenance as care, and to think of the time you spend caring for your green space as relationship building.
Your yard is a living entity that is constantly changing, and getting to witness and influence these changes is as much a privilege as a responsibility - it’s all in your attitude. That being said, there are things you can do to reduce the amount of labour required to care for your green space. In order to achieve a garden that is easy to care for, first we need to change our thinking, then we need to learn to work smarter, not harder.
June is National Indigenous History Month in “Canada”, so let’s unlearn some colonial programming and examine how we got this idea that the Land needs to be maintained. Indigenous Peoples across Turtle Island have had sophisticated Land Stewardship practices since time immemorial. These practices typically don’t dramatically alter the Land in the way that farming does, instead they are integrated into the existing natural systems. These food systems provide diverse and abundant food sources in ways that can be sustained for generations. The work required to harvest from these systems is certainly challenging and laborious, but for the most part it isn’t as intense as clearing and plowing acres of land for mass crop plantings.
In order to dispossess Indigenous Peoples of their Lands, Colonial powers created the Labour Theory of Property - basically if you put labour into the Land, it becomes yours. This was the promise given to settlers, in order to ensure there was a robust (white) population occupying these Lands. All the care that had been put into these Lands for millennia was discounted, and the “Lazy Indian” stereotype was created to encourage division between newcomers and the original inhabitants. There is an efficiency in Indigenous Food systems that leaves ample time for leisure - which is quite offensive to the Protestant work ethic. So in the name of decolonization: I give you permission to revel in finding the “laziest” ways to care for your yard.
Now that we are of the same mind about how we’ve been duped into working harder - not smarter, let’s examine the word “maintenance”. The only constant in our world is change. Deciding that your yard must be maintained in one specific way is putting you at odds with the laws of Nature. You will not win against Nature. Certainly, you are free to expend enormous amounts of time, energy and resources to maintain your yard - but why would you want to? Ultimately your yard is a space that should make you happy, and you’re not going to be happy if all you think when you look at it is a giant to-do list. Instead, with some changes in perspective and learning to work with ecological systems, it’s possible to have a yard that you love without having to micromanage it.
Work Smarter, not Harder
Here are six ways to work with ecology when planning your landscape:
1.Plan for change. The ecological word for this is succession. Your yard is an ecosystem and as the plants you add mature and others die, things like sun exposure, humidity, and soil moisture will change - which in turn will change the kinds of plants that will thrive there. That is okay! You won’t be able to predict all of these changes, but one example is if you’re planting a tree. At first, there will be very little shade cast by this tree, and the plants around it need to tolerate the sun. Then over the next 5-10 years the tree will grow and the plants under it need to be more shade tolerant. This means you should probably avoid investing in expensive plants for these areas where you know there will be big changes in microclimate.
2. Open soil that receives sunlight must be filled with vegetation - if you don’t fill the area with vegetation, Nature will happily provide volunteers. It’s important to avoid creating open spaces if you don’t want to be weeding all the time. Additionally, when the garden is full of plants, you don’t notice the “weeds” that do pop up. Bark mulch can be used to cover the ground while the plants are filling in, and newspaper or cardboard (with all tape and plasticy bits removed) can be placed under the bark mulch when you need heftier weed suppression (do not use landscape fabric!!! It will never break down and just become a problem years down the road).
There are so many weeds in this photo - but they don’t stand out because the garden is full of plants
3. Right plant, right place. I know I just said that you should fill your garden if you want to avoid having weeds - but it’s equally important to ensure your plant has enough space to grow to its mature size. Otherwise you might be constantly hacking the plant back, or it could succumb to competition stress. Make sure to read tags or check mature sizes online, and give each plant enough space, with a slight overlap between plants. Right plant, right place also means picking plants that are right for the amount of sun and water available (which will change in different parts of your garden).
4. Stop “cleaning” your yard! Seriously, stop it! The circle of life can’t happen without things dying and decaying back into the soil. I will do another blog post on this topic soon, because it is so important. Adjusting your aesthetic preference to enjoy things that are a bit “messier” might take some work, but it is worth it.
5. Choose plants that are Indigenous to your area. These are more adapted to your climate and will be more resilient to climate extremes. They also form the foundation of the food web by attracting Indigenous insects and the critters that eat them. Definitely include your favourite ornamental plants, but the more native species you can choose, the better the outcome will be for your garden and the surrounding ecosystem. There’s also something really meaningful about choosing plants that have a long history with the space you live in.
6. Your yard and the plants in it are your teachers. In fact, they are your relatives! Personify them with the language you use to refer to them. Talk to them, and learn to listen to their responses by paying attention with all your senses to how they respond. Plants have more awareness and agency than we realize, and tuning into that can have profound effects on your sense of the world around you.
So now that we’ve shifted into a mindset of care over maintenance hopefully you feel empowered to stop putting pressure on yourself to have a perfect garden. You are going to make mistakes, and unpredictable things will happen. Your garden is like a moving art piece, a neverending dialogue between you and the natural world. As you begin to work with natural processes, you will begin to see the beauty in how things change from year to year and you will better learn what works for you. Take pictures of your yard in each season and you will see how much you have both grown!
Case Study
Below I’ve got a few images of a space that has taught me a lot. When we first created this garden in 2010, it was hard, dry clay soil that was difficult to dig in and almost nothing would grow in the shadier areas. We planted some things, but didn’t want to spend too much money and ended up with a lot of bare space at first. The red thyme carpet has slowly been shaded out as Columbine, Alpine Strawberry, Violets and Asters have seeded in the areas I had left bare. After over a decade of not cleaning up the leaves and twigs that fell in this garden, the soil is now fertile and the plant growth is abundant. The care this area requires now is some weeding a couple times a year and some occasional pruning.
I’ve made mistakes here: mainly planting trees and shrubs too close together. I’ve learned that building up the soil and getting things to fill in takes years. I’ve seen firsthand that sometimes our efforts to impose our will on the Land are futile, because the Land does what it wants. Due to life circumstances, this space has been neglected for the last couple of years and it does look a bit uncared for. In the coming months we will give this space some extra TLC and post some updates.
May 2010 - Pretty Boring
May 2010 - Even grass struggled to thrive here
May 2024 - it’s ridiculously lush - can you see the 18” tall planter buried in there? This is all from a couple clumps of plants that were dug out of someone else’s yard
PS. If you want to learn more about Indigenous food systems, I highly recommend checking out a couple of episodes of the Future Ecologies podcast. Forest / Garden and Sea / Garden are both fabulous episodes. There’s also a mind-blowing episode on plant intelligence called Everything Will Be Vine. The whole podcast is fantastic, I really can’t recommend it enough.
