Plant collection

Low Maintenance Plants

Low maintenance is a brief, not a plant type. These plants hold their shape without staking or watering every second evening. Buy from here for a driveway edge, a nature strip, any bed you drive past more than you walk through. Wrong page if you want succession colour. Low maintenance describes year two onwards. Year one is still work.

Match the plant to your ground

Most failures start the same way: chosen on looks, planted in ground that never suited them. Santolina and convolvulus come out of dry summer country around the Mediterranean, and blue chalksticks is South African. All want sharp drainage and a crown that dries out. Cracking black clay in Melbourne's west and humid Brisbane nights work against them. Plant Blue Chalksticks raised, in gritty mix or a pot, or leave it out. Do not use leaf colour as the test. Westringia Zena is grey-green and takes clay, salt wind and humidity; the silver eremophilas are arid-zone Australians. Strappy foliage is the workhorse. Lomandra and dianella handle clay, coastal sand, salt and half a day of shade, which is how they carry a garden in Perth's alkaline sand. Poa labillardieri is different: a creek-flat grass from south-eastern Australia, at home in heavy soil and Southern Highlands frost, wrong for Perth limestone.

How many to buy, and in what size

Pot size decides how finished the bed looks on day one. A 140mm pot holds about a litre and a half of root, a 200mm four and a half litres, a 300mm nearer fifteen: a plant you lift with two hands. Small pots planted thickly beat a few large ones: three or four 140mm lomandra or dianella per square metre close over in two summers, 5L stock at two or three. A drift of one variety reads as deliberate, and a closed leaf canopy is the only weed suppression left once the mulch breaks down. Westringia Zena comes in 140mm, 200mm and 300mm, so a long low line can go in as small pots with two big ones at the corners.

The jobs that are still jobs

Plant in autumn if you can, no deeper than it sat in the pot, mulched coarse and thick, kept off the stems. One deep soak a week drives roots down, and autumn-planted stock will run on that through its first summer. Plant in spring or summer and it is two or three a week for six weeks, because a litre and a half of root ball does not last seven days at thirty-five. A daily sprinkle keeps roots shallow, and the first hot windy week finds them out.

After that the work is small, but some of it wants gloves. The euphorbias bleed a caustic latex that burns skin and can injure an eye, Euphorbia milii is spined as well, and the trimmings poison dogs and cats, as does blue chalksticks. Agapanthus sap irritates skin, and the older seedling forms set seed heavily, so cut spent stems before they dry, especially if you back onto bushland. Gazania is declared in South Australia, restricted for sale and movement. Fruiting olives are bird-spread into bushland and count as an environmental weed in South Australia and parts of Victoria and NSW. Pick the fruit. Lomandra and poa build dead thatch after three or four years and want one hard cut, back to about a third of their height, in late winter or just after the spring flowers fade. Kangaroo paw fans blacken in humid weather; cut them out at ground level, spraying does little.

Kangaroo paws give more flower on the same water, though they want a feed in spring and again after the first flush or the spikes come thin. For a hot courtyard or rockery on sand, succulents go further. Dry shade under an established tree, where much of this page will sulk, belongs to liriope and mondo grass.

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