Low-Maintenance Landscaping Plants

Match hardy plants to those tricky spots in your garden.

By Sharon Amos
Updated on July 17, 2024
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by Shutterstock/Svitlyk
Japanese crab apples can be planted in any soil.

Find a list of low-maintenance landscaping plants for your garden’s hot, sunny, windy, dry and wet shade spots to cover all the in-between spaces.

Working with nature is the easiest way to plant a garden. Even a small landscape has shady corners and sunny ones. On a larger site, there’s every likelihood you’ll find patches of dry soil and damp areas, slopes, ditches, or poor stony soil. There’s far less risk of failure if you match plants to these different habitats, because they’ve evolved over thousands of years to cope with them.

Once you’ve become familiar with some of the ways plants deal with different conditions, you may even be able to assess an unfamiliar plant and make a reasonable guess where it’ll be happiest in your landscape.

Plants That Thrive In Hot, Sunny, Dry Sites

One of the key ways plants deal with drought is by having smaller, narrower leaves. Small leaves, especially thin, needlelike ones, lose far less water than big, flat leaves with a large surface area. The leaves of common broom (Cytisus scoparius) are virtually nonexistent, for example, and are no more than tiny scales on its tough, wiry, green stems. Leaves of other drought-tolerant species may have a tough, shiny cuticle to prevent water loss, such as those of shrubby hare’s ear (Bupleurum fruticosum).

Many plants of hot, dry places have thick, fleshy leaves that can actually store water – the ice plant (Hylotelephium spectabile) is typical.

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