The 10-Minute Garden: Design Rules That Keep Maintenance To A Bare Minimum
Create an easy, breezy, beautiful backyard with just 10 minutes of effort each week, by following these practical, doable pointers
May is a busy month outdoors, with a garden workload that can appear overwhelming. But believe it or not, a low-maintenance yet gorgeous backyard is achievable. A few tweaks here and there – with the design of your space, the plants you grow, and how you tend to them – can result in an outside space that takes just 10 minutes a week to keep looking fresh, healthy, and colorful.
I'm not talking about large estates here, or gardens with acres of high-maintenance lawn. Let's be realistic. But if you're the proud owner of a small backyard, a generous urban patio, or similar, I've put together a set of golden rules that you can follow to transform that space into a brilliant low-maintenance affair that will bring joy with the minimum of input from you.
In terms of low-maintenance backyard ideas, these pointers for a 10-minute garden are up there with the best. I'm not giving you anything complicated or costly here. Just practical, tried-and-tested steps that will give you more time without compromising on gorgeous flowers, lush foliage, and the joy of sharing your space with all kinds of garden wildlife. Here's how to go about it…
Design Out Your Time-Sponge Zones
Take a long, hard look at your outdoor space and think about where most of your time is spent. Chances are it's in one or two of a handful of areas. Change these, and you change how you interact with your backyard and how much time you'll need to spend looking after it.
The most time-consuming element of a garden is likely a lawn. Think of the essential lawn care tasks, that time you spend mowing, edging, fertilizing, raking, and scarifying, all in the name of the perfect green space.
If you're after low maintenance, a lawn is the first thing you should get rid of. Landscape with gravel or gravel inlaid with occasional pavers instead. You'll still be able to lie back and enjoy the sun. Do it well, and you'll create an infinitely more sustainable and environmentally diverse backyard space.
Next up: herbaceous flower borders. There's no denying that deep borders filled to the brim with flowering perennials are a joy when they come into flower. However, caring for flowering perennials is high effort, what with all the deadheading, dividing, mulching, feeding, pruning, and watering involved.
I'm not saying you shouldn't grow any herbaceous perennials (plants that grow, flower, then die back to ground level over winter, before repeating that life cycle again in spring).
But the key is to choose wisely and replace at least half of them with less labor-intensive shrubs and ornamental grasses.
Shop white gravel bags at Ace Hardware.
Shop shrubs at Perfect Plants Nursery.
Choose Container Plants That Care For Themselves
Annual bedding plants are the ones that pump out colour from (usually) late spring to fall, then die, never to return.
They're great if you're after bags of color in pots, but the truth is, they're high maintenance. Annual plants need plenty of TLC in terms of deadheading, watering, and feeding, and you have to buy more, plant them, and do it all again every year – or several times a year if you're going for pots of seasonal color in winter too.
Still keen on containers? Then there are heaps of perennials that will serve the same color-boosting purpose.
In hot spots, try succulents like aeoniums and sempervivums in free-draining compost mixed with horticultural grit. Lavenders, sedums, Mexican fleabane, and long-flowering hardy geraniums such as 'Rozanne' will give you plenty of bang for your buck, too.
In shade, hostas and ferns are a gorgeous, lush option; use them to underplant a Japanese maple in a larger container. I also love easygoing heuchera varieties and bergenia (elephant ear) in pots in dappled shade.
Browse lavender varieties at Burpee.
Buy ferns at Burpee.
Shop Japanese maples at Perfect Plants Nursery.
Buy Geranium 'Rozanne' at Burpee.
Turn To Easy-Care Evergreen Shrubs For Year-Round Color
If you've decided to get rid of time-consuming herbaceous perennials, you'll need something to fill those gaps. Which is where shrubs step in. Forget any dated ideas of shrubs being boring. There's such an array to choose from that you could never get bored, and they're so undemanding.
For color 12 months of the year, pop in a few of the best evergreen shrubs. Pittosporum, box, and yew are classics that can be shaped if you like.
Or choose flowering shrubs that are also evergreen – think abelia, lavender, rosemary, daphnes, and ceanothus in sun; choisyas, camellias, azaleas in semi shade, and dramatic fatsias, scented winter flowering sarcococca, and mahonias in shadier spots. Some of these won't ever need pruning, others just a quick trim once a year.
Buy evergreen shrubs at Trees & Plants.
Shop flowering shrubs at Perfect Plants Nursery.
Let Your Plants Do The Work
Instead of seeing your plants as yet another thing to take care of, flip the script and look instead at what they can do for you.
Self-seeding plants are your friends, as they will soon fill any gaps without your help, and naturally create the cohesive look you get when plants repeat themselves within a space (more on this below), forming natural-looking colonies.
My favorites are a pack of love-in-a-mist seeds, like these from True Leaf Market, strewn in a sunny corner in spring; forget-me-nots, annual poppies, giant mullein, and foxgloves. Self-seeders work especially well in gravel gardens, by the way.
Patches of bare soil will soon be overtaken by weeds, so use some of the best ground cover plants here to block them out. Hardworking, reliable options include lungwort (Pulmonaria), Cyclamen hederifolium, epimediums, and Brunnera macrophylla for light shade, while I use creeping thyme, lady's mantle, Mexican fleabane, and hardy geraniums in sunnier areas. Once established, they're all undemanding plants that can be left to their own devices.
Perhaps one of the best planting tips for a low-maintenance space is to repeat plants within your space. It's a trick all of the best garden designers use, as not only does it reduce maintenance time, but it also creates a cohesive, unified look in your backyard.
Look for plants that perform well in your space, or your neighbor's yard, and plant more of them. Then, if you do need to cut them back, for example, they're easy to tackle in one quick burst of activity. It's really that simple.
Hand Over Responsibility For Watering And Feeding
If you've gone down the route of growing perennials in containers, I find a drip irrigation system like this one from Amazon is a brilliant time-saver. Connect it to a timer on an outdoor tap, and you're done for the summer.
Another tip for pots is to add slow-release fertilizer when you plant up. It'll last a year at least, gradually adding the nutrients your plants need without you having to lift a finger.
In the gravel garden, meanwhile, that gravel mulch around your plants will lock in moisture and keep out the majority of weeds, so once they're established (do water during their first year, to get those roots delving deep into the soil), they're unlikely to need much irrigation, if any.
10 Minutes A Week In Your Low-Maintenance Yard
Let's imagine you're all set with your 10-minute garden.
You've replaced the time-drain lawn with an easy-care gravel area, ditched annual bedding plants in favour of shrubs and perennials in pots, identified the best plants for your particular backyard and used them on repeat, and set up an automated watering system.
Here's what your weekly gardening schedule in spring could look like…
4 mins: weed out any unwanted self-seeders (replanting in gaps that might need filling)
2 mins: feed any perennial pots planted more than a year ago, using a liquid feed
2 mins: cut back deciduous grass such as stipa to 4in (10cm) from the ground (early spring)
2 mins: cut back any dead growth from your gravel garden or any remaining border plants
In summer…
5 mins: water anything newly planted in the gravel garden
3 mins: prune back lavender after flowering to keep it neat
2 mins: check containers and adjust irrigation settings if the weather's hot and sunny
And in fall…
10 mins: mulch containers and any remaining borders with leaf mould, garden compost, or composted bark
I hope you've seen that creating a low-maintenance garden needn't be an arduous task, giving results that will leave you richer in time and the proud owner of an outdoor space that looks great all year round.
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