How to Create a Low Maintenance Landscape in Maine That Still Looks Amazing
A low maintenance landscape is designed to look great year-round without constant upkeep. With smart design choices and the right plants, you can have a yard that looks great year-round without spending every weekend maintaining it.
Whether you live in coastal Maine, the foothills of New Hampshire, or anywhere with short summers and variable conditions, here’s how to design a low-maintenance landscape that delivers curb appeal with minimal effort.
1. Choose the Right Plants for Your Site
Start with native plants and hardy perennials that are adapted to Maine’s climate. Look for drought-tolerant varieties that don’t need constant watering or special soil amendments.
Some of our favorite low-maintenance plants include:
Bayberry (Morella pensylvanica), which is salt-tolerant, native, and great for poor soils
Juniperus virginiana, a tough evergreen that provides erosion control and resists deer
Sedum, a low-growing groundcover that thrives in full sun
Catmint (Nepeta), a long-blooming, drought-tolerant, pollinator favorite
Black-eyed Susan, which adds bright color with very little upkeep
These selections reduce the need for fertilizers, trimming, and pest control. If you’re planting on a slope, go with groundcovers or stabilizing shrubs to help with erosion and weed suppression.
2. Go Big on Mulch (The Right Way)
Mulch does more than just look tidy. It suppresses weeds, retains moisture, and insulates plant roots. Choose natural bark mulch or pine straw instead of dyed or rubber options. If you prefer a coastal look, crushed shell or gravel mulch can keep maintenance down while staying visually appealing.
Avoid over-mulching, and treat mulch as part of your design. Fresh mulch rings around trees or in garden beds can make a big difference in appearance, even before the plants fill out.
Mulch depth and material choice play a major role in long-term plant health and weed suppression.
3. Ditch the Lawn (Or Keep It Small)
Lawns are classic, but they require time, water, mowing, and fertilizer. If you are redesigning your yard or starting from scratch, consider alternatives like:
Creeping thyme or clover as groundcovers
Gravel patios with bluestone or cobblestone edges
Pollinator gardens filled with native perennials and ornamental grasses
Crushed shell or oyster shell driveways and pathsIf you do keep a lawn, choose a low-input grass seed blend that fits Maine’s climate and limit the area to what you’ll really use. A small, well-defined lawn surrounded by beds or hardscape can still anchor the whole yard visually.
4. Use Hardscaping to Define the Space
Hardscapes like paths, patios, and edging reduce maintenance and add structure. Natural stone, fieldstone, and concrete pavers are all durable options. Bluestone walkways and cobble-style edges make for clean transitions between lawn and garden while also limiting weed growth.
Hardscaping also helps eliminate the need for constant edging and trimming. In small yards, it can create the illusion of more space and reduce your need for water and fertilizer.
5. Plan for Function, Not Just Looks
A low-maintenance yard still needs to work for your lifestyle. Think about how you want to use the space. Do you need room for entertaining, space for kids or pets, or screening from wind or neighbors?
Design for real life. That might mean evergreen hedges for privacy, a dry creek bed to manage stormwater, or raised garden beds that you plant seasonally. When every element has a purpose, your yard becomes easier to care for and more enjoyable to use.
How We Can Help
Garden Guys Landscaping helps homeowners in Cape Elizabeth, South Portland, Scarborough, and Portland create outdoor spaces that look great without requiring constant upkeep. Whether you’re planning a landscape renovation or looking for low-maintenance garden ideas, our team is here to help.
Track where the hours actually go
Before redesigning anything, list what you or your crew do in a season and how often. For most Southern Maine yards the time falls into a handful of chores:
- Mowing and string-trimming, weekly from May into October
- Hand edging and weeding along bed lines
- Shearing shrubs that have outgrown their spot
- Spring and fall cleanups, especially leaves
- Watering new or struggling plantings in dry spells
- Repairing turf and beds damaged by plows and snow piles
Each chore has a design fix. The goal is to remove the recurring chore rather than do it faster. Our companion post on designing an easy-care landscape covers layout principles; this one works chore by chore.
Removing trimming and edging
The string trimmer is out for every foot of lawn that meets a wall, a fence, a tree trunk or a bed. Replace those seams with a flush mowing strip of pavers or stone set level with the lawn, so the mower wheel rides on it and cuts the edge in one pass. Pull lawn back from trees into a mulched ring. Where beds meet lawn, a hard edge stops grass from creeping in, which is where most weeding in a bed starts. See hard-edging your lawn.
Removing pruning
Most pruning time goes into shrubs planted where they do not fit at maturity. A shrub that wants to be eight feet wide beside a walk needs shearing every year. Choose plants whose mature size fits the space and the job disappears. Shrubs that bloom and fruit also stop doing either once they are sheared into balls.
If the yard already has oversized shrubs, the fix is usually a one-time decision rather than more annual work: remove and replace with a smaller plant, or renew a shrub like a lilac or dogwood by cutting a third of the oldest stems to the ground each year for three years. Formal clipped hedges are the one planting that will always need regular shearing, so keep them only where the formal look is worth the hours.
Removing cleanup and snow repair
- Let leaves stay under shrubs and in back beds as mulch; clear them only from lawn, paths and front edges
- Leave sturdy perennials and grasses standing through winter so fall cleanup is lighter
- Mark where plows and shovels push snow, and keep that area lawn or gravel instead of shrubs
- Keep salt-sensitive plants several feet back from driveways and walks
Removing mulch and watering
Plant densely enough that plants cover the soil, and the annual mulch job shrinks to touch-ups. Re-mulching thick layers every spring leads to buried crowns and bark piled against trunks; see common mulching mistakes. Group thirsty plants in one zone near a spigot, and plant the rest to survive on rainfall once established.
Our landscape design service plans yards around these maintenance hours, in towns including Scarborough and Westbrook.