5 Low-Effort (But Stunning) Garden Additions 2025
Gardens can take up a lot of your time if you’re not careful. Before you know it, you’ve spent half the weekend weeding the beds and mowing the lawn.
But what if there was an easier way? What if you could somehow create a stunning garden while, at the same time, reducing the amount of time you have to spend on it?
That’s the topic of this post. It looks at some low-effort garden options that look great but won’t gnaw away all your spare time.
Here’s what you need to know:
1. Add Perennial Flower Beds
You could start by adding perennial flower beds. These don’t require you to add new bulbs every year, but just keep returning from an original plant year after year.
When planting perennials, make sure you place them in well-drained soil and facing the sun. Most species are quite robust, which is different from annuals, so they don’t need shade during the middle of the day. Just water them regularly and wait for blooms, mainly in the summer and fall months.
2. Create A Succulent Rock Garden
Similarly, you could explore the idea of creating a succulent rock garden. Again, these look great and don’t require much effort. What’s more, unlike perennials, succulents are highly drought-resistant, meaning they can survive prolonged periods without rain or watering, lowering the effort you have to apply even further.
Of course, succulents don’t quite look as good as perennials, but they can still be attractive. Though smaller and less vibrant, they’re often purple, green, and yellow, for dramatic displays in desert environments.
3. Add Artificial Grass
Another option is to add artificial grass instead of trying to maintain a lawn, especially in dry areas or those prone to getting boggy. Artificial grass costs virtually nothing to maintain and remains green year-round. Plus, you can slot it into areas that require some additional greenery. For example, you could use it as a form of synthetic ornamental grass and use it to cover patches of bare rock or soil that would be unsightly otherwise.
4. Invest In A Vertical Wall Garden
Vertical wall gardens sound like they should be high effort, but the reality is that they’re not. In fact, they’re actually quite easy to maintain.
When you put ferns and herbs on the wall in pots, they don’t require a lot of upkeep. Plus, you can add a sprinkler system overhead with a timer so you don’t physically have to go outside and do the work yourself. The machine will do it for you.
You can also put vertical gardens on a sunny or shaded part of the wall. This way, you can determine which species will thrive the most, depending on the amount of light they want.
5. Use Mulched Shrub Borders
Finally, if you want to cut back on weeds and help incumbent plants grow, using mulched shrub borders is essential. These allow plants like viburnum and spirea to grow without much effort while still producing stunning seasonal flowers.
For this approach, plant shrubs along a fence or a path and then cover the soil with mulch behind to stop weeds from coming up and ruining the look.
