Your staple no fuss plants

[Laurasanford111]

Hi all
First year creating our garden, it's quite long so we have a lot of growing & planting to do, so far we have Nepeta, geranium a pink one, Gaura, a few roses and Hydrangea that were already here. I have fallen in love with Nepeta, how quick it grows, the smell, it's drought tolerant it requires very little, what plants do you like preferably perennials that you really don't have to try hard with but with amazing pay off?

Thanks :)

For the early spring hellebores are great - ours require no effort and seem to be self seeding so we have a nice little patch under our tree.
For later spring/early summer I love our dicentra, which has reliably come back each year since we've planted it. We have a white one, but I wish I'd got the pink one to have more impact on the border.
Grasses are also great for low effort planting.

Lavender, Malva moschata, Welsh poppy, Astilbe, Geraniums, Hellebores are my reliable, no fuss staples. But I have a damp shady garden.

Musa banana trees are minimal effort and very high impact

I love heuchera - colourful evergreens that form low mounds of leaves with small spikes of flowers. Come in red, purple, orange, green and seem totally unbothered by drought, flood and frost.

Heucheras. Seemingly indestructible (my DC play a lot of football in the garden), evergreen, a huge range of colours of leaves and interesting but not in your face flowers. I shove one in whenever I have a gap and am not sure what else to put there

Our Jasmine has been flowering for about 6 weeks already. Smells amazing, is evergreen so doesn't leave a bare patch in the winter. Good for covering sheds and fences!

@nobodygoesdowninthejungle - snap. And yes they bounce back fine after being trampled on/footballs landed on them. Have you seen the heucheraholics website? I’m a bit obsessed.

@ASimpleLobsterHat ah I love a dicentra I first saw them on gardeners world, a few people on Instagram i follow have got them to they are so pretty, I am definitely going to add that to my list of plants, yes grasses I need to research the best ones for my garden!

@AbacusAvocado I saw these only not long ago on a gardening programme, I love the pink type ones definitely going to add these somewhere next year 😍

Lavender. I've got several that bloom at different times of year. Rosemary. Poppies. Viburnums. Red robin. Salvias. Wallflowers. Potentilla

I like Acers (Japanese maples) although you need the right soil (if other people have them locally, you probably do). Their leaves and bark are so pretty and they are so elegant.

Sedums, euphorbias, hebes.

Low effort plants depend a bit on garden aspect etc, what's low effort in the right place turns into high maintenance and disappointing in the wrong one!

My garden is more or less east-west with high-ish fences so i have a shady north-facing side and a sunny south-facing side. Here's my list:

Shady side: fuschia, hydrangea, choisia (Mexican orange blosson), california lilac, some roses, wild strawberry, spirea, penstemon, hebe, lambs ears, currants, gooseberries

Sunny side: savlia, rosemary, lavender, all the cottage garden perennials (delphinium, campanula etc), all the low spreading alpines (snow in summer, rock cress, sedums etc), mallow, budleija, some roses, most fruit

Enjoy experimenting OP!

I know you asked mainly for perennials but don't forget spring bulbs - E,g. clusters of cheerful little tete a tete daffs near the front of borders, bigger ones behind. Pulmonaria and primroses for the spring too.

salvia hot lips
camellia
ferns for shade

Persicarias are one of the plants that do best here (damp, shady garden in Wales). We've planted several different types that flower at various times and I love them all.

Also astilbes, darmera peltata, solomon's seal, veronicastrums and trachystemon orientalis - all of which have formed large, healthy clumps.

Wall flowers, they require very little input and look beautiful.

I've got into salvias this year and have about 6 now 🙈 very low maintenance for months of flowers.

I'm also a big fan of spring bulbs, they cost peanuts, minimal effort to plant and they come back year after year - what's not to love?!

My other low fuss plants other than perennials (which I think other posters have covered) are self seeders e.g. foxgloves, honesty and forget-me-nots. The latter need a bit of time pulling them out when they're over but I think I'd have more weeds if they weren't covering a lot of the soil between emerging perennials in the spring.

Placemarking

I don't think anyone has mentioned Sedum Spectabile yet (official name now Hylotelephium spectabile) - unfussy and easy to propagate, nice foliage and then flowers that butterflies and bees love at the back end of summer.

Surprised to see salvia come up so much. I'm hating mine - they look great as just regrowing and starting to flower in spring, but they look awful now with excessively long stems collapsed all over the grass and patio. They don't stay upright. Nightmare!

Lavender, Rosemary, Creeping Thyme, hellebores, buddleia, salvia's & our trifid blackberry hybrid - an absolute monster but gives back so much to us & wildlife.

Lurking

I would have included hebes on my list but every single one of mine died in the big frosts last winter, while everything else lived so I dont trust them now.

Great thread. Throwing veronicastrum and rudbeckia into the mix. These look good with echinacea if you can manage it. Japanese anenome (although you can get leaves, leaves, leaves for ages before flowers eventually come, so think about interplanting with something of interest earlier in the year, possibly a zingier green to counteract what can be rather dark and dreary leaves). Alliums are fabulous sculptural bulbs, and the seedheads look good for a long time (also, in our rather badly drained, sloping, London clay garden, about the only bulb that doesn't rot in the ground over winter).

I will be upgrading our garden this year post-landscaping, and will bookmark this thread, thanks OP!