5 Tips For a Simpler Garden: Create A Beautiful Space With Ease

These 5 tips for a simpler garden incorporate techniques to grow your own beautiful garden, even if you’re short on space, time, or experience.

Simply put, gardening can be work…or it can be fun and relaxing. At one point in my life, quite a while ago, gardening was a chore I disliked, and it exhausted me. However, I knew it was not something I could just stop doing. At that time, we lived in an older home, with a large yard. We had to maintain and care for everything.

At some point, and I don’t remember exactly when, I decided that changes had to be made in regards to how I managed the garden chores. In other words, I had to simplify the process. What follows are 5 tips for a simpler garden, and they can work for everyone, no matter where you live, or how much experience you have.

Plant Perennials

Deciding to plant perennials was a light-bulb moment for me. In my younger days, when May rolled around, I would trudge to the garden center and purchase flats of annuals. I planted them, which was a chore in itself, and then I had to maintain them for the rest of the summer. I finally decided enough was enough, and one year instead of annuals, I bought perennials.

At the Sutton Place house, I had a patch of yard along my neighbor’s fence that I made into a perennial garden. It was a labor of love, and there was definitely a learning curve. I planted hosta, coreopsis, clematis, peonies, daisies, and dianthus. After that, I planted lavender, allium, and black eyed Susans. When we moved some plants around to accommodate a smaller patio, some daylilies were added. It was always changing and evolving, but that kept things interesting.

You might be thinking to yourself that planting perennials sounds like a lot of work…and it can be. The difference is that it’s not a one time thing. The flowers come back year after year…and if there is a summer that you, for whatever reason, don’t plant anything, you will still have blooms. There were many summers when I didn’t plant one single thing!

I do use annuals in containers on our porch and patio. Planting annuals in containers is smart because you can easily move them around to get the best light, and change your space’s look. It’s a great way to garden in small spaces, and enjoy colorful flowers seasonally.

Consider Plant Maintenance

32 years ago when we moved to Sutton Place, I inherited a few giant hosta plants, but little else in the way of thriving landscape…and hardly any grass due to a yard full of trees. I kept all the hosta, and slowly added low maintenance plants like hydrangeas, daylilies, slow growing evergreen bushes, and boxwood. Everything planted around the Sutton Place house was basically care-free, and required little or no maintenance.

Plant In Containers

Container gardening is, in my opinion, the best of both worlds. You can have a legitimate garden, yet it’s half the work of gardening in the ground. Would I like to have lovely raised beds? Yes, actually I would. The problem is that I can’t do something like that on my own. I don’t have the skills or the tools (or the energy!) So, in the past, I lined our deck, and later our patio, with all sorts of vintage containers. It was fun, there was hardly any clean-up, and it was budget-friendly. Since we moved, and I’m working with a much smaller area, using containers adds interest and color to an otherwise plain space.