Low-maintenance GARDEN IDEAS

Spend more time relaxing and less time working in your outdoor space with these clever design solutions

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Are you just too busy for lengthy gardening jobs? These low-maintenance garden ideas are the answer. They'll allow you to do more of the things you enjoy in your plot and less of those that you don’t. So that means more relaxing, and far less time weeding - hooray!

If you're starting from scratch, a low-maintenance garden is a fairly easy goal to achieve. But, if you’re struggling to keep on top of what you've already got, there's a simple solution. All you need to do is work out which gardening tasks currently take up a lot of your time and effort, and which you least enjoy doing. Then, find ways to either ditch those jobs altogether, or at least to minimise the time you need to spend on them. It can be done.

There are bound to be some garden tasks you find really rewarding but that are nevertheless quite time-consuming, so start by making a ‘priorities list’ of jobs you're happy to continue with. Do you love growing your own veg, for example? To give you more time for that, other garden tasks need to be streamlined or simplified. Take a look at these ideas for inspiration.

Deck it out

Decking makes an attractive, hard-wearing surface for seating areas and it's also a good replacement for labour-intensive patches of lawn. But if it's wooden, it's by no means maintenancefree. Wood lookalikes are the perfect solution.

Composite decking is manufactured from recycled material, and resists fading, staining, scratching and mould. It won't rot, warp, crack or splinter and just a simple soap and water cleaning every now and again is all that's needed to keep it looking like new for years.

Go simple with paving