POST COVID AU NATUREL
No-maintenance is the go but take a pass on the artificial monstera
Low-maintenance gardens have been on my mind a lot this year. There are a few reasons — some quite sensible, others not so much. Just for starters, my increasingly sore hands (RSI, OOS, whatever today’s vernacular is) make lots of garden tasks difficult and no, that’s not just the jobs I don’t want to do. Then there’s the epileptic dog, who needs constant monitoring and endless spoiling, both of which take up a fair amount of time, to say nothing of mental energy. And there’s my disinclination, as I get older and more sensible, to do the same jobs over and over, knowing that in a few weeks or months, I’ll be wondering how to avoid this in the future.
Quite a few friends who gardened their way through lockdown have also decided to make low maintenance a priority. All of them were very disappointed to find that you could garden every day for six weeks and find it would all need doing again right about now.
Just for fun, The Landscaper and I walked our wine glasses around the garden the other evening and came up with The Definitive Plan for a nomaintenance garden. This was the list.
● 1. No plants, and especially no deciduous trees
● 2. Solid concrete paving with expansion joints only — no other gaps
● 3. Synthetic grass only, edged with concrete blocks, not timber
● 4. No painted, stained or oiled materials
● 5. No mechanical devices such as automatic opening gates which need maintenance
● 6. No ponds or water features There were lots more, but by the time we’d reached item 6 we were wondering whether an apartment in a retirement village might be the go, and whether an artificial monstera (probably cheaper than the real thing anyway) in a maintenancefree, glazed ceramic pot would be allowed.
The idea didn’t really appeal, so at the request of my gardening-weary friends and with the help of my Auntie Google, I found some good advice from an American gardener called Tom Spencer, who was recommending including more formality in the garden.
“People often assume that formal gardens are more difficult to create than those that try to replicate natural settings, but I have found the opposite to be true,” he wrote.
“Wildscapes are hard to pull off, and most end up looking a whole lot more wild than their creators intended. I admire totally naturalistic and native plantings, but they don’t feel like gardens to me so much as landscape restorations.
“It doesn’t matter whether you have your heart set on a wildflower meadow or a jungle, weaving some formal elements into your landscape will make it feel more inviting and will certainly make it easier to maintain and use.”
Gardens with some formal elements have been back in fashion for a while, and I’m pretty sure that they’ll become even more popular now that Covid-19 has given us a fair old taste of being a slave to the garden.
But they don’t have to be exclusively formal — formal gardens and wildscapes can actually co-exist quite nicely, thank you.
Tom Spencer on his website quoted another US garden designer, James David, on how this could be achieved.
“I like to start with classical designs and then ‘destroy’ them with loose, informal plantings,” James said succinctly.
Briefly, a classical formal garden starts with a recognisable ground plan organised around a central axis or pathway. In bigger landscapes there could be several routes that cross the central path and radiate out.
The geometry of the formal garden is clear and easily identifiable, but it has to be properly scaled and balanced. And although it will generally rely on right angles (yes!) it’s acceptable to use regular symmetrical shapes such as circles, ovals, ellipses and equilateral triangles. (Oh dear.)
If you can limit both the materials and the plant palette, you’ll achieve a garden that is lower maintenance and more serene. Choose hard landscaping elements that suit your environment and work with existing architecture, and stick to those. Balance off formal hedges (The Landscaper is a hedge enthusiast) with clumps of loose shrubs like sasanqua camellias and soft, wavery lomandra grasses, and position any pieces of garden art for contrast.
The Landscaper and I figured this combo was the perfect way to get the sort of casual garden we liked, but with good structure and less maintenance.
We stopped wondering whether an apartment in a retirement village might be the go, and whether we would allow ourselves an artificial monstera in a maintenance-free, glazed ceramic pot.