Are you looking for a new, low-maintenance garden? Is spending time every weekend in the garden not really your thing? Would you like to know how to have a lush garden that requires minimal gardening? Or even how to transform your existing garden?
With over 30 years of experience in creating gardens for all kinds of customers, we understand how to design a garden that is low maintenance right from the start. We have created over 500 of them!
Essentially if you understand the basic principles that go into making a garden low maintenance you can minimise the time and effort you have to put into your garden to keep it looking healthy and gorgeous. Some of those principles might surprise you. And there are some simple tricks to learn as well.
Hopefully, by the time you get to the end of this article, you will know a bit more about these principles that could help you create the low-maintenance garden you are dreaming of.
If you look at all the various tasks that go into maintaining a garden, you could summarise them as follows:
Mowing (especially true if you have large areas of lawn or grass)
Watering
Weeding
Pruning/plant maintenance
Repotting/replanting
From the above list it's pretty clear to see that if you could reduce mowing, watering and weeding, you'd dramatically reduce the amount of time doing the most arduous tasks in the garden which few people really enjoy. (Many people say to us they actually enjoy the pruning and repotting/replanting aspect of their garden.)
Of course, it's important to understand that every garden does need to be maintained in some way or another. After all, they are living, growing things. It's just that some need a lot of maintenance and some need very little.
At the very heart of designing and creating a low-maintenance garden lie three important factors:
understanding your soil conditions
selecting the appropriate plants
providing the right irrigation
If your landscaper has just finished creating a new garden for you, some important factors can go into how well the garden gets established and how much work you might end up doing in it.
You may not have thought about it, but the season when your garden is planted can greatly determine the risk you have of plant loss in the initial 6 months of life of the garden. It will also greatly influence the amount of plant nurturing you will be required to do.
In an ideal world, the best season to plant any new garden is autumn. This is because the soil is still warm from the summer months and this will help to promote root growth which leads to plant growth. The air temperature is also still warmer than winter but not as hot as summer, so this also aids plant growth.
If you do end up planting your new garden in summer you will have to be very careful and watch your garden closely. In Melbourne, summers can vary from 19º one day to 35º the next day. If you get a run of several really hot days up to 40º or over you will really have to do a lot of watering to take care of your new plants.
We would not recommend you plant your new garden in winter. Spring is OK and many people think it must be the ideal time to plant. However in spring the ground is often still cold from winter and while plants will bloom above ground, the important thing with new plants is for them to get their root systems established and this can be hard if the ground is still cold.
A lot of Melbourne's suburban areas have very heavy clay soils. If this is the case with your garden, the problem with clay soils is they tend to become dry and rock hard in summer and sodden wet in winter.
Balwyn North is one area where we do a lot of landscaping and this tends to have both shale and heavy clay.
Now if you live around the bay or down the Mornington Peninsula you might have very sandy soil, which behaves totally differently from a heavy clay soil. Clay will trap water when it's wet but sandy soil tends to allow water to flow straight through like a filter. So if you planted the same plant in these two completely different soils, it would require a completely different watering schedule for each type of soil.
Understanding the behaviour of your soil is a key factor in determining what your plant's watering needs are. A plant can become stressed from both over-watering as well as under-watering so you need to know what signs to look for in your plants in your soil.
Many people tend to have their irrigation system on a "set and forget" mode, which can lead to under and over-watering. You have to actually know how to check and adjust your irrigation system to suit the changing weather conditions. When a long hot spell is due, you need to adjust it to add extra watering time and frequency. Conversely, if you're in the middle of a big winter wet spell, you want to dial it right back or even turn it off.
While soil conditions and seasons will heavily influence the frequency and volume of water your garden needs, the type of plants in your garden is another key determining factor.
For example, a native garden will likely need less water than say a garden with more exotic plants. That's because Australian native plants are more used to the drier, harsher local climate but imported plants, particularly European plants are used to a cooler, wetter climate.
There is one way to quickly test your soil and determine if you might be under or overwatering. Just dig a hole with a trowel next to where a new plant has gone in to find out how deep the water is soaking into your soil. If you dig and discover that the soil is wet all the way down to 200mm or more, you are probably over-watering. But if you find that the soil is only wet down to 50mm or so, and then dry below that, you are probably not watering enough as it is not soaking down deep enough.
Mulch is a common way that people try to retain water in the soil of their garden. But not everyone understands how much watering you need to do first for the mulch to absorb the water and for the soil below the mulch to then start absorbing the water. If you simply wet the mulch and it sits on top of dry soil underneath, the soil is not going to get any of the moisture and the water will evaporate out of the mulch without having done anything for the soil. Mulch will help retain water in the soil below it if that soil has plenty of water in it to begin with. So remember when using spray-head irrigation with mulch to leave it on long enough for water to soak through to the soil below in sufficient amounts to be worth retaining.
When a plant is first removed from its pot and placed in the ground, it is at its most vulnerable state. It is easy for a plant to go into shock and start wilting and looking like it's dying. This is because the roots of your plant have not had enough time to spread and grow and start taking up water from the soil.
This is why it is so important when you plant a new plant (or transplant) that you more heavily water the plant than you normally would.
The best idea is to give the plant a really heavy soak as soon as you plant or transplant it. Preparing the soil is also important but that is more of your landscaper's job if they are planting out your new garden.
Of course, ensuring that you buy good quality plants from a reputable nursery is also important and if your landscaper is planting for you then it's their job to ensure this.
Apart from the soil conditions in your garden and your watering methods, sometimes other factors can heavily influence the success or failure of your new garden. Your landscaper should take into account these factors and allow for them.
If your garden is heavily sloping away from you then water can very easily run off and leave your garden severely under-watered no matter how much water you pour into it. Conversely if your block slopes into your garden, you can have run-off from your neighbours and the local environment pouring into your property, saturating the soil and literally drowning the roots of your plants. (Most people don't realise it but roots need to "breathe" in oxygen from the soil and if it's all waterlogged under there, then there is no air in the soil for the roots.)
If you have large, established trees, either on your property or next door, they can often be a real problem when you plant new plants nearby. This is because they have had plenty of time to grow large, well-spread-out root systems that suck all the moisture out of the ground, leaving very little left for the new, yet-to-be-established plants. In this case, you often have to increase the watering of the new plants to compensate for what the tree is taking away.
Snails, slugs, bugs and other creatures can often arrive suddenly in a new garden, attracted by all the fresh, lush new things for them to dine on! Using temporary covers or other pest prevention methods early can help your plants fight off their enemies while they get themselves established.
If you are in any semi-regional or semi-rural area such as the Mornington Peninsula, then you might also have a problem with things like rabbits. Again they can be attracted to all those lush new plants and hungry rabbits can strip a garden bare in no time at all. Again creating guards, barriers or fences can be important to help your garden get established enough to survive hungry rabbits, but they can also be an ongoing issue to contend with.
We always suggest to our clients to have an expectation of losing a small percentage of plants in a new garden to any or all of these factors and to allow for and expect that you will probably need to replace a few plants.
If you take into account all the above factors, you can easily see that there can be challenges in getting your new garden established. Some of them might not be so obvious to you and we have definitely not covered all the possibilities in this article.
Even if you choose the most low-maintenance plants available there is no guarantee of success. But there is one thing that many landscapers, including us at Whyte Gardens, recommend to increase your chance of successfully establishing your new garden. And that is to engage a horticulturist. They are THE plant experts.
A smart way to do this is to use them and their valuable advice when it's most needed - just when your garden has been planted. A few weekly visits for say the first month, expanding out as required to fortnightly and then monthly can be a very small price to pay in the first 6 months of life of your new garden. This is when your garden is at its most vulnerable and the expertise of a horticulturist looking at your plants "in situ" could be a very wise insurance policy. Once your garden is well established you might just want them to drop in once every season to check up on how the garden is coping with the changes in weather and offer you some tips on helping your garden get through the extremes of heat and cold.
The real value of an experienced horticulturist is that they can spot issues with a plant at a glance, well before any serious problem develops, reducing the likelihood of you losing any plants. They simply see things ordinary people don't notice. Their hard-won experience and knowledge that they have taken years to acquire is something most people will never gain even from decades of gardening.
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What's the most important element in a new garden?
What's included in a landscape designer's Master Plan?
If you'd like to have a chat with us about any aspect of landscape design and landscaping and how we can better manage the project for you, please feel free to call or email us. Use the contact page Contact us