So you really want to reduce the maintenance in your french garden ?
Garden maintenance, the war on weeds, call it as you wish it’s never going to go away.
Here are my top tips for gradually changing your tactics so that you can spend less time working on your garden and more time enjoying it.
The war on weeds is permanent. My most successful strategy for winning the war is all about occupying the terrain: here’s my theory: the more space you occupy with plants or mineral materials you do like the less space will be available for the plants you don’t like i.e. weeds. The tactical approach to this one is to use plants in your garden which occupy the surface of the soil. The obvious choices are groundcover plants. I won’t go into a list of groundcover plants because every single garden is different in terms of orientation, exposure, colour scheme etc. Let me just say that shrubs with a single stem/trunk which have a stiff upright habit occupy only a few cm2 at ground surface level, however a plant like a ground cover cotoneaster has dense evergreen spreading horizontal branches at ground level “occupying” the surface and beating all the competition hands down.
PS. Ground cover plants do need some maintenance too of course but they don’t need mowing 10 times a year.
