Bring Back The Colour
At Flora scope, we are flipping the script from Low-maintenance to Easy-care gardens this spring! Fill your garden with colour and brighten your day!
Low-maintenance Garden
Low Maintenance Garden
When people think of low-maintenance gardens, they often envision a space filled with strappy green foliage plants, succulents, and simple gardens.
Low-maintenance gardens are great for simplistic structure, with repetitive patterned planting. That fills a space with an abundance of greenery. The foliaged plants provide shelter for birds and insects. They bring movement and different textures to a garden and in most parts need little attention.
This garden style can be left for quite a while without maintenance and still look good on the surface, however like anything that is left for too long, when you look deeper there is quite a bit of work that now needs to be done. Quite often in this style of garden the plants will have a build up of browning and dead foliage underneath or throughout the growth. They are usually so heavily planted that now, at maturity, the plants are so close together making it hard to control weeds growing between.
To manage these issues every second plant or so will need to be removed and/or heavily cut back. Grass or strappy leafed plants have a fibrous clumping root system, so they can be quite an effort when they need to be dug out, making it a big job when it does need to be done.
The Easy-Care Approach
The aim of the easy-care garden is to move from purely functional greens towards including flowering plants that are both hardy and long flowering. There are quite a variety of flowering plants that are self-sufficient and thrive with a basic care routine but also rewards you with the vibrancy and life that comes with the seasonal colour in a garden.
The key concept is choosing plants that are both hardy and forgiving and are ideally drought tolerant requiring minimal attention. With a basic cut back and clean up routine once every 3-6 months when they start looking untidy, a simple trim anyone can do, these plants will spring back to life.
Here are three such example of plants for an easy care garden;
Ground cover - Nepeta species. As soon as they look untidy you simply cut them back all the way down to the ground. Pick up the clippings and you're done. All you need to know is if you cut them back too close to cold weather they will take longer to come back. So us gardeners normally cut them back two times of the year. Early spring and early autumn.
Shrub/bush - Salvias species. There is a whole world of different varieties of sizes and colours of Salvias to explore. The smaller species can most often just be cut to the ground. The others can be pruned or cut back to about ¼ to ⅓ in size. Pick up the clippings and you're done. If you look closely before you start, the plant is telling you where and when to cut it back. Look where the new growth has started growing from the base, then you can prune the old branches back to where the new growth starts. You will also be rewarded by a beautiful fragrance like that of herbs from both flowers and the cutting of the stems.
Tree - Lagerstroemia (crape myrtle). This small tree has it all. It's exceptionally
hardy and pretty. Flower colours range from white to purples, pinks and reds. Leaves can come in greens and dark burgundy greens. As a deciduous tree you also get the autumn leaf colour display. But don’t worry the leaves are small so they don’t make a mess. And at maturity the tree trunk is a feature of its own with its smooth snake like bark. This tree can also be cut back hard into the old wood if you need to control its height.
Largerstroemia
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| Low Maintenance Garden |
hardy and pretty. Flower colours range from white to purples, pinks and reds. Leaves can come in greens and dark burgundy greens. As a deciduous tree you also get the autumn leaf colour display. But don’t worry the leaves are small so they don’t make a mess. And at maturity the tree trunk is a feature of its own with its smooth snake like bark. This tree can also be cut back hard into the old wood if you need to control its height.
Design
But what if you're not into cottage style gardens? Because of the lack of structure, they can be messy looking. It's simple you can incorporate both strappy green foliage plants, succulents as well as long flowering and hardy plants. You can tone up or down the amount of foliage or flowering plants to adjust to your taste of garden style. And by using different types of plants you are less likely to over plant as you need to leave room for each plant to do their thing.
Using no more than 2-5 different plant types in a pattern to design your garden beds.
Height - Above we show a range of plant heights from ground cover to bush and tree. With the plants growing at maturity, placing the shorter plants at the front and working backwards setting the higher plants to the middle and back drop of the garden. Incorporating the three different height levels within a garden gives you a professional design, look and feel.
Shapes and Colour - Once you have arranged the plants in height simply group the plants of similar height, then mix and match placing the plants next to each other until you get a desired combination that you like the look of. Then you know the pattern you will plant them in.
Feature Plants - The final touch, incorporating a feature plant here or there. Choose a feature tree/s, potted plants or your favourite coloured flowering or foliage plant, strategically placed to catch the eye.
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| Salvia |
Attracting Birds and Bees to Your Garden
A key advantage of incorporating flowering plants is their ability to attract wildlife, particularly pollinators like birds, bees, and butterflies. By creating a garden filled with nectar-rich plants, you’re not only ensuring beautiful blooms but also supporting local ecosystems.
Bees and Pollinators: Bees are essential to the health of any garden, facilitating the reproduction of many plants through pollination. Flowering plants like Salvia, Nepeta, and Lavender are perfect for attracting bees. These plants offer a steady source of nectar, making your garden a haven for pollinators. In turn, bees help your garden thrive, contributing to the health of your flowering plants and increasing their blooms(Epic Gardening).
Birds: Birds are naturally drawn to gardens with a variety of flowers, which offer both food and shelter. Salvias and other tubular-shaped flowers are particularly attractive to bird honeyeaters and wattlebirds, while berry and seed-bearing plants can provide sustenance for birds during the colder months(Epic Gardening). Birds also help keep your garden healthy by controlling insect populations, reducing the need for chemical pest control.
By supporting wildlife through your plant choices, you create a more dynamic and balanced ecosystem in your garden. The result is not only a visually stunning space but also one that contributes positively to the health of your local environment. Isn’t it amazing how everything works together?
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