No matter how much you love gardening or how keen you are to landscape it so it looks stunning, most garden enthusiasts would prefer that it has the minimum of maintenance requirements, especially if the space they have is small.
That way they can focus on the really enjoyable tasks like planting and caring for their plants.
If that sounds like you, and you have a small yard that you’d like some low maintenance landscape ideas for, then we are going to oblige you with a number of these ideas which you can try.
Before you read on though, we must draw your attention to the excellent Ideas4Landscaping program which has thousands of simple and very affordable landscaping ideas. Click here to take a look at it what it offers.
Landscaping Ideas for Small Yards
Use Rubber Mulch In Flower Beds
While its name doesn’t sound very appealing, rubber mulch has many excellent benefits for those who wish to landscape in a small yard. The first is that it is relatively inexpensive, and because, unlike traditional mulch, you do not need to replace it each year, it becomes even more cost-effective.
One of rubber mulch’s most popular benefits is that it is very effective at keeping weeds away from flower beds and acts very much like a barrier to them.
Use Artificial Grass
Ok, we accept that using anything artificial in a garden might not chime with every gardener but for small yards, they are ideal, especially with respect to minimal maintenance. Artificial grass does not require watering, feeding or mowing, and it will look great all year-round, which cannot always be said about natural grass. Some types of artificial grass are so good that many people looking at it think it is real.
Switch to Tall Grasses
If it is the mowing and cutting of grass that you are trying to avoid but would still prefer to have something natural rather than artificial, then tall grasses could be the solution for you. Types of long grass such as bluestem and switchgrass require very little maintenance, and they are not the types of grass that you are ever going to mow.
There are various ways that long grass can be included in your landscaping plans such as being lined along a fence, positioned so that they form a pattern, or you could simply plant them in random locations around your yard.
Create Paths and Walkways
Unless your yard is extremely small is should be feasible for you to create one or more pathways that will reduce the amount of grass or flower beds you have to maintain. These paths can be very pleasing to the eye to the point of being decorative, depending on how they are designed.
These designs can include simple square concrete slabs as the most basic level, but they could also be so-called ‘crazy paving,’ colored slabs and more artistic designs using a combination of different shapes, sizes, and colors.
Add Yard Art
When considering a landscaping plan for a small yard, there is no rule that says everything which is included has to be a living plant. flower, shrub or vegetable. This means that you can include what might be considered ‘inanimate objects’ and one of the great things about them is you have a virtually unlimited array to choose from. These can be either in terms of what they are, or what color they are.
This could be chairs, small animal shapes, benches, large plant pots, small tables, birdbaths and sculptures to name but a few. If you do a Google image search for ‘yard art’ you will see literally hundreds of other ideas. The best thing of all is that every one of them requires minimal or no maintenance whatsoever.
Planting Several Evergreens
If you have ever spent numerous hours trying to clear your garden or yard of the leaves that have fallen from the plants growing there, you will agree that cannot really be classed as low maintenance. What would be though, are plants that do not shed leaves in the fall and winter, and of course these are called evergreens.
By having a landscaping plan that incorporated as many evergreen plants as possible, you will far less work to do with respect to clearing away fallen leaves. This can be as part of a new landscaping plan, or you could simply replace existing plants with evergreen ones.
All Hands On Deck
Actually, that should be feet rather hands as what we are talking about is using decking for walking on in some parts of the yard that would normally require maintenance if grass or plants were in those areas.
Although you might have to wash down any decking if it gets dirty from muddy footprints, for example, that is going to be all it needs. Compare that to having to mow the grass every few days then it is obvious that decking can be a great way to reduce the amount of maintenance required in your small yard.
Rock Features
The use of rocks within a garden is very common but they have a lot more to offer than simply being occasional features scattered randomly around your yard. By using a larger number of rocks, you can create a very distinctive feature within your yard that not only looks great, but also requires very little maintenance.
Another benefit of creating a rock feature is that how it looks is entirely up to you. You can select rocks from virtually anywhere such as canyons, rivers or the beach depending on where you live. There is an infinite array of colors, shapes, and sizes which guarantees your rock feature will be completely unique.
We hope you found those ideas useful and while we would love to have provided you with more ideas, there simply isn’t the space to do so in one article. If you are looking for lots of ideas, then why not check out ‘Ideas4Landscaping‘ which has literally thousands of them, many of which are ideal for small yards.