Planning a low-maintenance front garden space

Work out what the space actually has to do

Most front gardens are asked to do far too much. They need to frame the house, store the bins, take a delivery, guide visitors to the door and survive whatever the British weather throws at them — often on a plot that faces north, sits in the rain shadow of the house, or is shaded by a neighbour's hedge. Before you buy a single plant, stand at the kerb and look at the space with the bins in place. Note where the sun lands in winter, where water pools after heavy rain, and where you naturally walk. That short exercise will save you a fortune. A low-maintenance garden is not an empty one; it is a garden where every element is doing a job.

Get the ground right and half the work disappears

Weeding is the task most people want to cut, and the answer is nearly always the same: a proper surface, not a hopeful one.

If you are covering ground with gravel, dig off the top layer of soil and weeds, then lay a woven geotextile membrane across the whole area, overlapping the joints by at least 150mm. The thin, fleece-like fabrics sold in small rolls are a false economy — they tear and let light through. Cover with 50–75mm of 14–20mm gravel. Pea shingle is cheap but it migrates into the house, the car and the street; angular gravel knits together and stays put. Finish the edge with steel edging, timber, or a course of setts. Without a firm edge, gravel soon spills onto the pavement and the whole thing looks tired.

Where the ground is solid — a tired concrete path or a frontage you want to park on — remember that surfaces over five square metres usually need to be permeable or drain to a border, otherwise planning permission comes into it. Resin-bound gravel, block paving with wide joints, or plain gravel over a compacted sub-base all keep you on the right side of the rules.

Choose plants that earn their keep

Aim for a backbone of evergreen shrubs and grasses, roughly two-thirds of the planting, with the remaining third given over to things that flower or die back. Evergreens carry the garden through winter when everything else is sulking.

• Lavender and rosemary for a sunny, free-draining frontage. Both want sharp drainage and a light trim after flowering, not a hard chop into old wood.
• Hebe, Pittosporum and Euonymus for evergreen structure that shrugs off wind and coastal salt.
• Ornamental grasses such as pheasant's tail grass or Stipa tenuissima, which move in the wind and ask for nothing but a comb-through in spring.
• Hardy geraniums, alchemilla and nepeta to knit the edges together and smother weeds before they get going.
• Bulbs — snowdrops, narcissi and alliums — planted in autumn in generous drifts. They give months of interest for a few pounds and no watering at all.

Plant in autumn if you can. Warm soil and autumn rain get roots established before winter, and plants settle far better than anything pushed in during a dry May. Water them properly through their first summer, then wean them off. If a plant still needs a weekly soak in its third year, it is in the wrong place.

Use structure and repetition

The tidiest front gardens are not the most heavily planted ones; they are the most repeated. Choose three or four plants and use them again and again. A run of clipped evergreens down a path, one grass repeated along a boundary, a pair of matching pots either side of the door — repetition reads as calm and deliberate, and it hides the gaps where something has failed.

Clipped shapes do the heavy lifting. Yew, Ilex crenata and Pittosporum all take tight clipping far better than box, which is still troubled by blight and box moth in many areas. A low formal hedge or a few domes give the front of the house a frame, and they need one cut a year, in late summer. Keep them below about a metre so you can still see over them from the window and the pavement side — tall front hedges cause neighbour disputes and can fall foul of hedge height rules.

Add one or two generous containers. A single large pot with a shrub and some trailing foliage looks better than six small ones, and it can be shifted when the doorstep needs painting.

Keep the upkeep to minutes

Once the ground and the planting are right, maintenance becomes a monthly stroll rather than a weekend of chores.

• Hoe or hand-pull weeds when they are tiny and the soil is dry. Ten minutes a fortnight beats a full day in June.
• Top up gravel and mulch each spring so coverage stays at depth — bare patches are where weeds get their foothold.
• Deadhead lightly, but leave seedheads on grasses and sedums for winter structure and for the birds.
• Cut back perennials in late February or March rather than autumn, so the skeletons stand through the worst of the weather.
• Check pots in hot spells; they dry out far faster than the ground and are usually the only thing that genuinely needs a can of water.

Resist the urge to strim or hard-prune everything into shape in one go. It scalps evergreens, wakes up weed seeds and undoes years of growth in an afternoon. A front garden that looks after itself is really just a garden that was set up properly in the first place — good ground, tough plants, clear edges — and then left largely alone to get on with it.