Green grass is somewhat of a staple when we think of the quintessential British home, but it’s not cheap, easy, or convenient to maintain. As our summers get hotter and our winters get wetter the task of keeping a lawn happy is becoming harder.
Somewhat like Marmite, a lawn is either perfected and obsessed over or hated and seen as a huge chore which never looks good. A manicured lawn will need weekly attention in the growing season (9 months of the year - March to November), it’s very easy to get the treatment cycle wrong and regular watering in a heatwave can be costly.
Left to its own devices in backyard rewilding or with indigenous wild meadow flowers sown, converting a traditional lawn is a specialist art that requires a high degree of flexibility if a natural garden is to be curated for wildlife as the main users. Not without huge benefit, this is growing in popularity, but is not for everyone.
Designing a no lawn garden scheme
If you’ve given up on your lawn and are looking for garden ideas without lawn, you need a focus for the design. There are some key aspects to bake into your landscape ideas without grass, before taking the plunge. The key here is to narrow in on what you’re looking to use your garden for and make it proportional for your landscape space:
Is the garden more for aesthetic or functional purposes?
Will children and pets be playing in the garden?
How important is wildlife to you?
How much will you cook outdoors?
Where does the sun or shade travel across the garden?
What features are most important to you? (I.e., do you want water, beautiful brickwork or sculpture?)
What do you want to be able to do in your garden (i.e., a flower garden, sitting and entertaining, area for veggies, etc.)
A Beth Chatto style shingle dry garden is a fabulous option that is incredibly low maintenance. If you want something a bit more adventurous, then consider a series of different patios or areas, at different heights (I.e., some slightly raised or sunken, some for shade or sun, a cute little bench taking the garden from a different perspective). These different areas can be connected with pretty winding pathways and have varied materials to bring detail on surfaces.
Once the functional side of a garden design is determined, a garden needs a focus point. A key design feature, or if large enough, multiple features to enjoy:
A pergola with seating area for climbers to ramble over.
Obelisks rising from a planted border for structure and form.
A beautiful dry stone feature wall that curves and undulates through a planted border.
A trio of carefully selected and placed trees.
A water feature or sculpture surrounded by planting.
Feature rocks and boulders laid in a dried riverbed formation with a small reflection pool at the centre.
Artful log stacks or statement driftwood on shingle.
A circular retaining wall around a seating area with shrubs and planting as a backdrop.
Large feature pots with shells or pebbles around planting.
A garden that reveals itself as you wander - which doesn’t have everything on show from all angles - is the most interesting. Obscuring your viewpoints and leading you in to explore, rather than everything being placed around the perimeter with a central lawn. If you have the space for this, it delivers a winding journey of invaluable interest.
Pushing a mower up and down a steep hill on a hot day can be a real chore. So to reduce hard work on a sloping property, create a wide path through terraced garden beds of drought-tolerant plants. Stacked dry stone walls help hold everything in place, create crevices for insects and give the space definition. Gentle steps gracefully navigating the terraces with seating areas helps to navigate and enjoy.
How to successfully bring more plants into your garden
As a plantswoman, hard landscaping is always complimented and entirely brought to life by planting. Mixing a variety of rocks and shingle with varied foliage, brings a unique, ethereal design that can evolve through the seasons. Spring bulbs can pop through the shingle, summer grasses and floriferous herbaceous perennials can waft lazily in the summer breeze, showy autumn trees can provide dramatic backdrop colour changes, and winter evergreen shrubs can surprise with scented blooms.
Many think that maintaining so many plants is more time consuming than a lawn, but it really isn’t. For a shingle free garden, I always use fine border bark on a freshly planted border. This will help cover the soil while new plants are small, to aid with weed and moisture control. As rain compacts the soil and planting matures I generally weed a whole border 2 or 3 times a year - as shade from mature plants suppresses weed growth quite a bit. In between this I simply keep an eye on the edges and fronts of borders, where there is more sunlight on the soil.
I’m always assessing the borders, not just for plant health (I.e., curling unhappy leaves or pest infestation), but also for shape and form (I.e., what needs moving or adding). I try to have layered planting - low level under planting for shrubs to cover the soil, seasonal interest planting, and planting with an unpruned mature height that fits the space (and reduces the need for ladders, machinery or hired in help).
Being a garden designer I adore plants in different shapes, sizes, colours, leaf shapes, seasons and styles. However it’s easy to simply be a rudderless but avid plant collector. This often leads to one of each plant and a rudderless garden with many plants in the wrong place. A strong planting design theme really brings cohesion and lifts the overall aesthetic. This can mean editing out a few existing plants and adding more of the same for crucial repetition.
Considering a colour palette and planting style suitable for your garden situation and aspect (I.e., a traditional multicoloured cottage garden, a contemporary mainly green tropical shade garden, an evergreen blue-green conifer / herbaceous Tuscan themed garden) will be quite stunning.
This might sound daunting for the beginner plant enthusiast, so I always provide ongoing knowledge in a way that suits my clients. For example I think sharing knowledge and passion for plants is essential for those that want to build confidence with gardening. I often walk a clients‘ borders, especially in the first few years after we have completed a build, to help spot disease and other maintenance problems, to demonstrate pruning or thinning techniques at key times of year and to generally alleviate worries of a garden failing to mature healthily. I also provide online assistance via WhatsApp as I can advise a lot from a picture and a general area of concern. Googling concerns is always easy to help self-solve an issue and having a plant identifying App on your phone will help answer that age old question of what the name of a plant is (even professional garden designers go blank at times).
How to reduce overall maintenance without simply paving over your whole garden
Replacing a mostly dead lawn with a soft, airy palette of drought-tolerant ornamental grasses and other dry garden plants sparsely planted can achieve a minimalist California-style landscape.
Water-permeable gravel and large modern stepping stones leading from house to patio complete a low-maintenance look. An extra-wide path of flagstones leading to a spacious patio provides multi-purpose living - if an outdoor gathering requires more room, the pathway blocks are large enough to comfortably accommodate additional seating.
Add more comfortable oversized furniture to connect the garden with your inside living.
Be sure to consider shade, sustainable drainage systems and water management, different surfaces and carefully placed planting to avoid a heavily hard landscaped garden becoming too hot to enjoy in a heatwave or one which floods in a downpour.
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