27 Low-Maintenance Landscape Ideas for Your New Home

We purchased 3.25 acres of wooded land several years ago, and 2024 has been our first summer living in the house we’re building on the property. While working on the inside is a top priority, designing and landscaping the outdoors has been a massive part of “building our home,” as we spend lots of time outside in the summer and fall months. 

We knew we wanted to expand our living space, have a bug-free place to cook and hang out, and create beauty with natural elements, colorful perennials, and fruit trees. We’ve started a garden, received gifts of perennials from neighbors, and are working with the natural slope and shape of the land while attempting to support local wildlife and pollinators, conserve resources, and be good stewards of the land.  

Opt For Native Plants 

We often advise gardeners to select native plants when plotting new gardens, and there’s a reason. Native plants are perfect for a low-maintenance landscape because they naturally perform well in your region and look beautiful. With various styles and colors of shrubs, trees, flowers, and bushes, you can design a backyard or front yard oasis using natives. 

Native plants have naturally adapted to your region’s temperatures, humidity levels, and soil types, so you won’t need to worry about transplant shock, extreme weather, or drought conditions. Typically, these guys do just fine and bounce back when affected.

You’ll invite birds, beneficial insects, and other wildlife to round out your ecosystem to help control pests, provide a space for safe mating and reproduction, and increase pollination. Plus, you won’t need to water or fertilize nearly as much, or even at all. 

While movies and popular culture have made us believe that traditional, manicured lawns are the ultimate suburban life goal, native habitats offer the diversity our landscapes need to thrive—no chemicals or pesticides needed! 

Go Wild With Wildflowers 

Just because the word “wild” is in wildflowers doesn’t mean you can’t incorporate them into a well-designed and thoughtful yard. Low-maintenance landscapes don’t have to be unruly. Many seed companies offer wildflower mixes that balance early annual bloomers, perennials, and open pollination, getting you maximum blooms. 

Mixed wildflowers aren’t just easy to care for; they prevent erosion and attract pollinators with nectar. Their diversity appeals to many shapes and sizes of insects, birds, and hummingbirds. Plus, they provide safe nesting areas and resources for moths, butterflies, and more. When left to go to seed, they’re offered to birds and critters when food is scarce in the winter and spring months. 

Once established, wildflowers don’t need fertilizing, pruning, or watering. If you’re looking for low-maintenance and gorgeous landscape blooms, look no further. Select a blend that suits your region for the best results. 

Use Raised Beds 

With many raised bed options, you can design a landscape that fits your property and aesthetics. You can assemble Birdies metal raised beds in different shapes and sizes, and they come in several different finishes to match your home. These are great for aging gardeners, small-space gardeners, and those of us with kiddos helping out. 

To keep mowing to a minimum, consider heavily mulching around the raised beds to suppress weeds or adding small stones. Yarrow and chamomile make excellent pathway borders and should return yearly. 

Use high-quality wood when building your own wooden raised beds. Cedar is expensive but will last many years due to its naturally rot-resistant properties. However, pine is much more affordable and will still perform well with proper treatment. 

Edible Gardens 

What’s better than walking outside your door to grab ingredients for your breakfast granola, midday smoothie, or dinner side dish? Create an edible garden with your family’s taste preferences in mind, and you’ll feel like you’ve hit the jackpot every time you harvest. 

Edible gardens don’t have to be complicated; you can mix in trees, bushes, and evergreens. Have an unsightly but functional privacy fence? Plant blackberries, raspberries, and a fig tree along it so they can use it for support. Are you looking to add character to an existing arch leading to your fire pit area? Add trailing nasturtium and cucumbers at the base for beautiful vines that provide you with food. 

Other options include asparagus, lettuce, and herbs like lemon balm, mint, oregano, and thyme. When consistently harvested, many herbs will continue growing all season. Sow cilantro, parsley, oregano, and thyme for a constant supply of fresh herbs—bonus points for things that grow well in your region and don’t require much fertilizer or water. 

Perennial Flowers and Shrubs 

Perennials are the unsung heroes of low-maintenance landscaping, serving as the backbone of our gardens. With an enormous amount of height, color, and bloom time variation, you can arrange them to suit your design dreams. 

You can see the range of hardiness zones, and sun exposure offers many options for growers worldwide. Play around with different varieties to find a color scheme that works for you. One of my favorite ways to get exposure to new perennials is by asking a neighbor or friend to share perennial splits. Gardeners should complete this task every few years for the plant’s health, and it provides you with free plants. 

Get Creative With Lawn Art and Ornaments

If you purchase a new home that features a traditional grass lawn, but you don’t yet have the time to devote to changing it, why not decorate the space with arbors and lawn ornaments? 

The nice thing about lawn art and ornaments is that you can move them around, reposition them, and repurpose them as your landscape and design tastes change each year. 

Drought-Tolerant Plants and Flowers 

As our climate shifts, gardening demands can become overwhelming. When the stretches between rainfall get longer, drought-tolerant plants can help you create a beautiful outdoor landscape that remains low-maintenance throughout the seasons.

Plant clumps of drought-tolerant plants and flowers in large, empty spaces or places you want to naturalize. Naturalizing is a way to somewhat wildly fill an area of your yard informally. After identifying your ecoregion, select plants that will perform well in your climate. Only purchase seeds and plant starts from reputable sources. 

Grass Alternatives 

After pouring our home’s foundation, I could envision the yard, but it didn’t include traditional ‘Kentucky Bluegrass.’ My homesteader dreams didn’t involve spending my weekends mowing a lawn that played no significant role in our region’s wildlife and insect populations.  

After convincing my partner to let me manage the “lawn” ingredients, I settled on a mix of durable and soft grasses, native wildflowers, alyssum, and clover. Since our property mainly was sand and rocks with low fertility, we chose something that would help boost our soil’s health and attract wildlife. The best feature of the alternative landscape is that its very low-maintenance once established. 

Depending on your region’s climate and the traffic your lawn will see, you can consider clover, sweet woodruff, chamomile, creeping thyme, and various stonecrops. Before selecting, explore options’ mowing, sun, and watering requirements. 

Rock Gardens

Speaking of stonecrops, they’re the perfect addition to rock gardens. If you struggle with poor soil fertility, try creating beauty with rocks and stonecrops. Stonecrops come in all different shapes and sizes; some require full sun, while others thrive in dappled shade. They will fill in cracks in rock walls or form a mat-like ground cover. 

The spot where we’re building our house in New Hampshire might as well have been a gravel pit. It’s sandy soil (if you can even call it soil), with low fertility. I had no idea if I could get anything to grow in it, but I had to try. We used ¾ inch stone in many different areas to avoid erosion on our slope and built several retaining walls with giant boulders pulled from the property.

I threw in ‘Autumn Joy’ sedum, pansies, calendula, ornamental grasses, some hens and chicks, and perennial herbs, among other perennial flowers gifted from neighbors. Everything has performed well, even with the unseasonal heat we’ve experienced. 

If you want to be impressed with your low-maintenance landscape aesthetic during hot, dry summers, consider investing in gravel, rocks, and stones and filling in cracks, rows, and rock walls with stonecrops, creeping groundcovers, or cacti. 

Ornamental Grasses

I didn’t understand the hype about ornamental grasses when I started gardening. I thought everything had to be bright and colorful. Then, I learned the beauty of perennials and how to blend textures, colors, and heights to create an attractive, unique garden. 

When you incorporate grasses with your bright-colored annuals and perennials, your landscape will come together seamlessly and becoming more low-maintenance in subsequent years. Most require little or no pruning, and with so many varieties in varying heights, there is something to fit every landscape need. 

Grasses make nice pathway borders, hedgerows, and privacy fences. They also fill in gaps beautifully. Choose between evergreen sedges, warm-season grasses, and cool-season grasses. Pruning methods and timing will differ for each. 

Try feather reed grass if you want a full, dense effect. This option pairs well with lower-growing annuals, thrives in full sun, and provides late-season interest when the silvery seed heads appear. Switchgrass is a medium-height option that grows in upright clumps. It’s native and tolerates poor soil quality.

Little bluestem grass can grow to five feet tall and transitions from blueish-green in the summer to warm red and burgundy in the fall when its white, fluffy pods arrive. It self-seeds, looks lovely along garden edges, and will help naturalize your landscape over several years. 

Evergreens 

Evergreen plants are anything but boring. Their ability to remain vibrant all season makes them a staple for low-maintenance landscapes. Shape them to fit your aesthetics.

Plant them in a hedgerow to gain privacy without bulky metal or wood. Add an elegant background to colorful annual flowers, or plant a few standalone throughout your yard for visual interest and texture. 

These evergreen hedges are perfect for building a natural privacy fence that looks good all season. They’re dense, easy to shape, heat-tolerant, and many are deer-resistant.

Dwarf evergreens like ‘Blue Star’ juniper, Distylium, various boxwoods, and dwarf Hinoki cypress are great for hiding unsightly house foundations, but ensure your placement won’t interfere with the home’s structural integrity. 

Focus On Pollinators 

If you’re okay with your yard being a little wild, focus on pollinators and let the flowers do their thing. Attracting native bees, honey bees, hummingbirds, hoverflies, lacewings, and others to your garden will boost pollination and help increase the yields of edible crops. 

There are many more than this short provides, and many annual flowers that self-seed, returning each year in new areas. Even shrubs can help with pollination! 

Pots and Containers 

If you want to grow food but your garden’s soil isn’t up to par, consider pots and containers. Select various shapes, colors, and sizes of pots to add a unique flair to your space.

Fill containers with flowers, berries, and vegetables to keep the garden beautiful and practical. While they require more water than in-ground beds, container gardens can still be part of a low-maintenance landscape.

The kicker to making successful growth in pots and containers is to add automation. Have an irrigation plan before filling your pots and containers so you don’t become overwhelmed when the sun is hot and crops are thirsty. 

Shrubs 

Many landscape shrubs are known for being low-maintenance, and perform well even with neglect or less-than-ideal conditions. They help you look like a master gardener without much effort! 

Select from bright pink, magenta leaves, and white flowers. Most shrubs can be pruned once annually to the shape you like and to maintain their health. Research what they require for fertilizer, space, and sunlight and select accordingly. 

Cool-weather growers can consider ninebark shrubs, which are hardy to zone 3. They perform well in full to partial sun and actually prefer clay soils!

Small anise trees thrive in warmer zones and only grow to a compact mound of three or four feet. They’ll bloom lovely yellow flowers in the spring and continue to delight with golden leaves for the remainder of the season. 

Water Feature or Pond 

While water features and ponds aren’t entirely hands-off and require some up-front work, they give any outdoor space an elevated look and romantic vibe. They’ll also attract birds and provide a clean water source for local wildlife. Once established, a water feature is fairly low-maintenance, yet enhances your landscape to a magazine-worthy ambiance.

You can hire a professional to install a prominent, centralized feature or create one yourself that’s simple and inexpensive to build. Several DIY ideas online involve terracotta pots and water pumps, which can be integrated seamlessly into a garden of perennials or tall grasses. 

Building a pond is more advanced, so consult a professional or your local Natural Resources Conservation Services (NRCS) agent. Funding may be available for your conservation efforts. 

Create Shade

If you enjoy spending time outdoors but don’t love sun exposure, consider adding large shade trees and shade-loving flowers to your low-maintenance landscape plan. Shady areas will provide respite and safe havens for birds to feed and make nests, bats to hunt, and local critters like chipmunks and squirrels to cohabitate. 

Bleeding heart, hellebores, and columbine are a few flowers that tolerate partial shade. Combine them with mosses, ferns, and hostas under the shade of an oak, Japanese, maple, or weeping willow tree to create a quaint shade garden fit for reading a book on a warm day. 

If you prefer inorganic shade, install a shade canopy over your outdoor patio. To keep it interesting, move potted flowers and fruit bushes around throughout the season. 

Stone Work 

If you plan on spending lots of time outdoors but have no interest in manicuring a lawn, pulling weeds, or watering plants, consider hiring a professional to create a low-maintenance landscape and patio area with stones. 

Landscaping designed around stonework can be as simple or complex as you want. Let the stone’s patterns and textures be the star of the show. Using inorganic materials like stone reduces the time and energy spent on maintenance, like watering and mulching. 

Fill gaps with perennial herbs, ornamental grasses, and stonecrops. For pops of color, add hydrangea bushes or small fruit trees. 

Make a Rainbow

Choose perennials in every color of a natural rainbow. Plant them cascading down a slope or in a naturalized flat area and let them run wild. Consider perennials in multiple colors and shades, like chrysanthemum, roses, geranium, phlox, and coneflower. 

Imagine a sea of red monarda, butterfly milkweed, black-eyed Susans, sedum, clematis, salvia, and lavender in a lovely rainbow pattern. Bookend your rainbow with the white blossoms of a cherry tree for a big statement. Your local pollinators will be ecstatic, and it will surely be a dinner party conversation starter. 

Combine food with flowers to have a little fun. Arrange red and pink flowers alongside berry bushes, a mixed greens garden alongside evergreen shrubs, and sunflowers with your summer squash. Have fun discovering new shades of annual zinnias and snapdragons and alternating them each season. 

Ground Covers 

Don’t rule out ground covers as a way to create a backyard haven. There are so many lovely ones to choose from! They’re low-maintenance, suppress weeds and unwanted annual grasses, and look great in the home landscape.

Pro Tip: Avoid adding groundcovers around the base of plants that don’t do well with competition so they don’t become overrun or choked out. 

Naturalize It

You can naturalize an area of your landscaping by combining eco-friendly design ideas and native, perennial, and drought-resistant plants. Proper planning and plotting will make it a practical place for birds and bees to hang out while looking effortless. 

Adding even a few of these practices will help improve your local ecosystem. Studies show that spending more time outside can help lift our moods, so make your yard where you want to hang out and get your hands dirty. 

Xeriscaping 

Try xeriscaping for a type of dry low-maintenance landscaping that combines native plants, ornamental grasses, rock gardens, stones, ground covers, succulents, and more. These features can create a unique, drought-friendly, walkable, aesthetically pleasing garden. 

Dry gardening is widespread in western parts of the United States, where growers are adjusting to the lack of rain. Some states limit residents’ municipal water usage to irrigate lawns and gardens and instead encourage xeriscaping. 

Avoid fighting the climate and embrace dry regions by incorporating rocks, cacti, drought-resistant trees, shrubs, and flowers. These will only require what water nature provides, which will reduce your water bill, reduce garden labor, and conserve natural resources. 

Add Height and Visual Interest With Large Rocks and Shrubs 

If your landscape already has rolling hills, slopes, and exciting peaks and valleys, use them to your advantage while designing. Use groundcovers to prevent erosion and fill valleys with perennial shrubs that don’t mind getting their feet wet. 

Add boulders to the peaks alongside the hills and surround them with sweet alyssum, stonecrops, or Russian sage. If you see a lot of water run-off in an area, incorporate a water feature instead of fighting it. Choose shrubs with varying root systems to help drain the water and reduce erosion. The more you work with the landscape, the easier it will be to maintain. 

Expand Your Living Space 

If you love to entertain, grill in the summer, and spend evenings outdoors, expand the indoors by bringing it outside. Open up the doors and envision what you want your future outdoor living area to look like. 

Keep it simple by laying down an outdoor rug, surrounding it with insect-repelling plants in large pots, and setting up a cozy chaise or a loveseat under a shade tree. Add a shade cloth or water-resistant canopy to create an area where you can read a book even during summer rain showers. Hang solar-powered lights and a hammock. 

Pro Tip: If you’re a serious home chef, consider adding a pizza oven, fireplace, wash sink, and a screened-in area to keep your festivities bug-free. 

Fruits and Vegetables 

Grow fruits and vegetables, as they’re beautiful and perfect to display. To keep your edible landscape low-maintenance, pare down what you’re growing. Simplify your crops to what you love to eat and grow just enough for you and your family. Don’t be the family leaving zucchini on neighbors’ porches! 

Cultivating your own food doesn’t have to be complicated, but I think most of us who love growing food can easily get carried away. Perusing through seed catalogs in the winter can cause an “add to cart” frenzy. Don’t get caught up in the shiny, new cultivars. Stick to the basics, and you’ll have a beautiful garden that’s easy to maintain. 

Remember, automated watering and indoor growing spaces like low tunnels and greenhouses will simplify your gardening. Add a simple wash sink that drains out of the garden for a real treat so you can rinse your goodies before bringing them indoors. 

Sedges

Many gardeners think all sedges are weeds. However, many sedges are appropriate for gardening and are not considered invasive. When appropriately positioned throughout landscaping plans, sedges add visual height and fill empty spaces. 

Arrange sedges within a rock garden, choose them as an alternative to traditional lawns, or create a border with them. They’re versatile and attractive, with grass-like options that tolerate foot traffic and are adaptable to wet and dry conditions and sun or shade. 

Try sowing gold sedge in March and watch in wonder as it suppresses annual weeds. It will quickly creep and won’t require any mulching. An easy sedge for beginners is Carex muskingumensis, which isn’t picky about sun or water levels. Select field sedge or brown sedge in place of other popular groundcovers. If you’re looking for a soft, short, tuft-like sedge, select cedar sedge that stays green nearly year-round and performs best in mostly shade. 

Plant Seasonally 

While this type of garden requires extensive pre-planning, it will be worth it. Planning should combine researching natives and perennials for your region, general maintenance, and bloom times. Keep track of each plant’s features in a spreadsheet, which will come in handy when plotting out everything you select. Plot out the garden space, keeping all this data in mind. This is especially helpful if you’re starting from scratch. 

Pair early spring bloomers with other plants or flowers that turn on when they are turning off for the season. Overlap annual and perennial bloom times so the colors are constantly changing. 

Select plants that don’t need much attention and look great all season, such as hostas, salvia, lavender, and creeping phlox—bonus points for being excellent at attracting pollinators. 

Rain Garden 

Growing rain gardens can help growers divert water, prevent erosion, and repurpose rainfall into irrigation water. Add a rain barrel to capture rainwater, then connect an irrigation system and water from the barrel.

Work with your land and soil type to allow it to flow naturally. When it rains, go outside and observe how the land, gardens, and lower parts of the property react. Build your plans for a rock garden around those areas. For example, if you have sloped areas, design areas where water can flow down into an area of native, deep-rooted plants to help mitigate standing water and decrease topsoil erosion.