The Problem with “Low Maintenance”

There are certain phrases that have become so common in gardening that nobody seems to question them anymore. Year-round interest. Pollinator friendly. Low maintenance. We all nod when they're said, as though somewhere there's a universally accepted definition.

There isn't.

In fact, low maintenance may be the least agreed-upon phrase in gardening.

It comes up on almost every consultation. Someone looks across the garden and says, “We're hoping for something low maintenance.” It's a perfectly sensible request, but it's also strangely unfinished.

Ask one more question “What does low maintenance mean to you?” and the conversation changes completely.

One person points to the roses. Another points to the lawn. Someone gestures toward a rhododendron with all the enthusiasm of someone opening an email that begins, “Just circling back...”

One homeowner says watering feels like another task squeezed into an already busy week. The next says watering is the only half hour of the day when nobody expects anything from them. One person genuinely enjoys pruning. Another would happily never pick up a pair of pruners again. Within five minutes, everyone has answered the question.

Nobody has given the same answer.

It's a bit like people who say they want an easy dog.

Easy because it doesn't bark? Easy because it doesn't shed? Easy because it doesn't need walking twice a day? Easy because it won't eat the sofa, dig up the garden, or lose its mind every time the doorbell rings? Eventually you realize you aren't talking about the dog anymore.

You're talking about the owner.

Gardens, it turns out, work exactly the same way.

That's why we've always smiled at those articles promising The Ten Best Low-Maintenance Plants.

As though somewhere a committee has finally settled the matter. “Then it's settled. Viburnum requires precisely 17.8 percent less effort than Spiraea.”

“Are we including hydrangeas?”

The meeting immediately overruns.

Of course, choosing the right plants matters.

A shrub with enough room to become a shrub may need very little from you. Put the same shrub eighteen inches from a walkway and suddenly you're pruning it three times a year and blaming the shrub.

It wasn't the shrub's idea to be planted there.

A groundcover can quietly do its job for years or spend those same years making a determined attempt to annex the neighbor's property.

A hedge can be simple and orderly, provided someone remembers that simple and orderly requires someone to keep it that way.

So yes, good plant choices matter. Good spacing matters. Putting a plant somewhere it actually wants to grow matters quite a lot.

But even the best-designed garden still asks something of you.

Plants grow. Leaves fall. Weeds arrive. Shrubs get bigger. Things need watering, dividing, pruning, moving or occasionally admitting that they were planted in entirely the wrong place.

Which is usually where a conversation about low maintenance starts becoming a conversation about something else.

Time.

Not how much maintenance a garden requires on paper, but how much time someone wants to give it. Because an hour spent pruning roses doesn't feel like maintenance to someone who loves pruning roses.

To someone else, it's an hour they could have spent doing literally anything else. The same is true of mowing the lawn, pulling weeds after dinner or dragging a hose around the garden on a summer evening.

The work hasn't changed.

What we think of the time has.

And that changes too.

The garden that worked perfectly ten years ago may not work perfectly now. Children arrive, then grow up. Jobs change. People travel. Knees become less enthusiastic about kneeling. Saturday mornings become more valuable for reasons you couldn't have predicted when the garden was planted.

Meanwhile, the maple you planted when it was barely taller than you now shades half the garden. The shrub you remember bringing home in the back seat of the car has become something you can stand underneath.

Gardens are funny that way. They keep a record of time without really announcing it.

What felt manageable ten years ago may simply not feel manageable anymore. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the garden. It may just mean the definition of low maintenance has changed again.

Maybe it's fewer plants. Better spacing. Less lawn. Maybe it's finally removing the shrub you've been arguing with for fifteen years. Maybe it's keeping everything you love and getting some help with the parts you don't.

There isn't one answer.

Which, inconveniently, means there probably isn't a list of ten plants that will solve the problem either.

Because maybe “low maintenance” isn't really a gardening question.

It's a question about time.

How much of it we have. What we want to spend it doing. What we're happy to keep doing ourselves, and what we're ready to hand over to someone else.

Those answers change. Of course they do.

But the funny thing is, the garden has been changing right along with us.

Maybe that's what gets lost when we talk about maintenance. We count the hours we spend on the garden. The pruning. The watering. Saturday mornings lost to weeds. But somewhere along the way, those hours become something else.

Shade from a tree you planted. A view from the kitchen that wouldn't look right without that shrub. A garden that, without you quite noticing, has been growing up alongside you.

Maybe that's what the word maintenance gets wrong.

It makes all that time sound like work.

And some of it was.

But maybe the point was never to spend less time on the garden.

Maybe it was to have a garden worth spending time on.