Low maintenance is as much about the person doing the maintenance as it is about the landscape and the actual work needed to maintain it. More mature trees with balanced understory growth means less maintenance. Your goal is to slow natural succession by creating health and balance so that succession isn’t in such a hurry to take over your land. So if you have lots of early growth – grasses, flowers, and the like – you’ll have a lot more maintenance.
So here’s the trick to low maintenance: the more stability you can achieve in your landscape – in other words, the closer you can get to a mature, climax community – the lower your input needed to maintain it. Whether you realize it or not, an unspoken intention of this kind of controlled planting is to prevent unwanted and undesirable vegetation from invading your property and taking over. Your intention may be to have an expanse of lawn perhaps a garden and beds to grow a variety of shrubs, flowers, and the plants hedges for privacy and large trees for shade. Makes you sound pretty powerful, doesn’t it? Your property – with whatever level of maintenance you provide it – is considered a “managed environment.” That means you’ve developed an ecological community in a confined area and now manage the growth and expansion of all the parts of that community. You’re essentially trying to slow down a natural process. The whole idea behind maintaining your landscape is to hold succession back. This process is always in motion, but it becomes highly noticeable if you stop mowing and weedy growth moves in (primary succession), or after a catastrophic event such as a forest fire, after which grasses, shrubs, and then the forest re-establish themselves (secondary succession). The meadow, over time, turns into mature forest, known as a climax community. For example, shrubs and weedy growth will be the first plants to establish themselves in an untouched meadow, followed by fast-growing evergreens and other softwoods that eventually are replaced by hardwoods.
This is something ecologists call “succession” - a term that is used to describe the successive process of plant establishment and growth over time. So any homeowner who takes a completely hands-off approach will find their property filling in with whatever plants happen to like their property’s environment. Most people realize that “low maintenance” does not mean “no maintenance.” All landscapes requires some kind of care, but with a little planning and insight, maintenance can be minimized.Ī simple, irrefutable fact of nature is that nature abhors a vacuum – that is, nature likes to fill in open spaces with plants. Let’s demystify the term “low maintenance”
LOW MAINTENANCE LANDSCAPING HOW TO
Everybody loves a beautiful landscape but who really loves taking care of it? If you’re a homeowner who envies a gorgeous landscape design but dreads the idea of having to take care of one yourself, take heart – we’ll show you how to achieve the landscaping of your dreams with minimal maintenance.