Easy Care Gardens
Love gardens but don’t have the time to maintain one and hiring a landscaping company or garden is a dream? Don’t forego the garden, use a low maintenance garden instead and forget weekly pruning and daily deadheading.
The easiest and most budget friendly plants for gardening are perennials. They come back year after year for dependable color. So why not use only perennials in the garden and forget about it?
They don’t bloom non-stop during the growing season like annuals do. The best garden uses perennials with annuals, which are plants that do all their growing and blooming in one season and need to be replaced every year. The annuals fill in the bare spots when perennials aren’t in bloom, which varies by each plant.
Choose perennials with long bloom times and different bloom times to get the most bang for your landscaping buck. The best low maintenance choices for perennials are:
Coreopsis
Nonstop blooms from summer until fall, no deadheading necessary.
Campanula
This upright perennials produces bell-shaped, violet-blue flowers from early summer to fall. They also make a lovely cut flower.
Echinacea / Cone-flowers
Coneflowers add height and color, usually purple, and come back without fail year after year and bloom most of the summer.
Lavender
Lavender is a classic long blooming plant for growing anywhere in the full sun and it loves dry soil – although the purple blooms are lovely and can be dried for potpourri, the texture of the plant when not in bloom is just as fetching.
Scabiosa
Also known as the pincushion flower, Scabiosa offers pink or blue blooms from June to September. Not the easiest care perennial though, as it is susceptible to powdery mildew.
Sedums
Sedums are one of the hardiest plants around – if you kill a sedum then you’re really plant-challenged. They have handsome, waxy leaves and fall blooms.
Yarrow
Yarrow is another foliage favorite in the garden with a lacy look almost as attractive as their blooms, which last from June through July. Easy care but susceptible to powdery mildew, yarrow makes a wonderful cut flower as well.
Your gardening doesn’t have to be a daily chore, or even weekly to make it a standout in any landscaping plan. Your biggest issue is going to be weed control. There are plenty of treatments to address weeds, so don’t let a little weeding scare you away.