Plants are beautiful decorations for your garden, and luckily there are many of those which are easy to care for if you have a busy lifestyle. There are plenty of varieties that don’t need staking, frequent deadheading and dividing, complicated pruning, or excessive watering. Below we’ve listed the most popular low-maintenance outdoor plants for busy gardeners.
Daphne
Daphne is an evergreen, easy-care attractive shrub, with beautiful yellow-edged foliage. It has intensely fragrant white blooms in winter. The right conditions are full or filtered sun and well-drained soil. The beautiful Daphne requires no pruning, but be sure to plant it where it will have room to spread. Since Daphne is a relatively small and slow-growing shrub, it’s a good choice for small gardens and containers.
©Derek St Romaine – Daphne is an evergreen, easy-care attractive shrub with beautiful yellow-edged foliage.
Catmint (Nepeta)
Catmint is a non-culinary mint variety that has aromatic foliage, long-lasting blooms, and good drought tolerance. It’s one of the low-maintenance outdoor plants that busy gardeners love because of its beauty and color. You’ll enjoy clusters of purple-blue flowers of Catmint from April through October. It forms wide clumps, and needs room to spread. Plant it in the sun to part shade and this hardy plant will grow and flourish naturally. You just need to cut it down to the ground in the fall.
©Shutterstock – Busy gardeners love Nepeta because of its beauty and colour.
Rozanne Geranium
Rozanne Geranium flowers non-stop from late spring until a hard frost. This plant has an abundance of tiny, brilliantly colored periwinkle blue flowers with a white throat and dark purple veins.
Hardy Geranium is one of those plants that are great for curb appeal, and it will never look unkempt. Plant it in spring in part shade to sun, in moist, organically rich, well-drained soil, and it will bloom amazingly. Remove wet or moldy leaves at the end of the growing season and let healthy foliage remain for winter.
©Photoshot – Rozanne Geranium flowers non-stop from late spring until a hard frost.
Vinca
Vinca is one of the popular low-maintenance outdoor plants that will add color to your garden. They bloom in every shade of the pink, rose, and lilac spectrum and attract butterflies. If you can provide full sun and regular watering, you can expect them to bloom richly until frost. Vincas that are fertilized every other week can grow in almost any soil that drains quickly. They are pest-free and great for busy gardeners who can choose from beautiful Vinca varieties such as:
©Shutterstock – Vinca needs virtually no maintenance once established.
Low-Growing Sedums
Carpeting forms of Sedums (also known as stonecrops) are very easy to care for, and they can survive unfavorable conditions of all kinds. There are many evergreen and herbaceous varieties to choose from with various foliage colors. They can produce flowers from bluish-gray to reddish-bronze, which will add wonder to your garden. When you find the perfect style for your yard, designing a tapestry of these weed-suppressing, drought-tolerant succulents will be very exciting.
©Shutterstock – Carpeting forms of sedums are very easy to care for, and survive unfavorable conditions of all kinds
Final thoughts
Being a busy gardener may seem like a daunting responsibility. You probably don’t want plants just to survive – you want them to thrive. You want to keep an eye on them, check how they are doing, and give them all your love and affection, but sometimes that seems like a lot of effort. However, if you follow the right advice and choose low-maintenance outdoor plants, you’ll be able to keep your garden beautiful without too much work.
I’m proud to say that I have been a passionate gardener for more than 20 years. Working as a landscape architect got me constantly improving my knowledge and skills, to meet all the modern design standards. My hobbies include writing blogs, volunteering at an animal shelter, and meditating.