Low maintenance plants that don't need watering
Homeowners and office managers dealing with newly cleared landscaping beds need plants that survive neglect and don't require regular watering or upkeep. Without truly drought-tolerant, set-and-forget options, landscapes quickly become overgrown and weedy when staff or owners are rarely around to maintain them.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Pulling out high maintenance plants and replacing them with boxwoods
- 2Filling beds with white rocks
- 3Planting cut leaf Japanese maple and aggressive ground cover
- 4Densely planting low native grass or sedge with mulch
- 5Adding a sunshade ligustrum, barberry, dwarf cryptomeria, and sky pencil holly
- 6Using boulders and hostas
- 7Thinking of planting poppies, lupine, or bee balm
- 8Using day lilies
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“We need something that is low lying and low maintenance. The previous owners had very high maintenance plants here that we could barely keep up with maintaining so we ended up pulling them out and planting boxwoods. But I need something else to put in here.”source ↗
“Bed in front of my office. Here's the kickers. I'm rarely there. The people that are there won't do anything to maintain it. I don't even trust that they would water it. I don't want to put much money into it. This needs to be plant and forget, and not look too weedy.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 6Narrow garden plants that don't need constant pruning
- 11How to landscape a small and busy front yard
- 3How to cover a large area with groundcover on a budget
- 4How to landscape around outdoor HVAC units and electrical wiring
- 3How to prune unfamiliar plants without killing them
- 2Best ground cover for a dog run that isn't sharp gravel