Ideas for outdoor areas, garden, garden landscaping - suggestions, tips?

"Low-maintenance" always sounds so bad when it comes to gardens. Everyone always wants greenery and nature, but please not right in front of their own door. Then they pave and fence off with double rod panels and add a bit of cemetery tree. And then everyone wonders about insects and bee die-offs.

Every garden needs care, whether it’s with gravel (in my experience even more so) or with a skillfully designed planting.

I am always very glad to hear that a change in thinking is taking place in cities and municipalities, and that landowners are being required by building regulations to make certain plantings. This also has to do with the heating up of inner cities and so on. Seeing and hearing about how often new buildings are planned, this should have been done long ago. My opinion! There is a page called "Save the Front Garden" on Facebook. There you can see the horrors of an allegedly low-maintenance rock garden in all its intensity.

With you, the special feature of a wheelchair-accessible garden surely comes into play. I didn’t know that. Still, you can design such a garden to be close to nature!

The coneflower you like is already a good start.

In general, I agree with you. "Low-maintenance" is more due to lack of time, which is the case for me at the moment. How it will develop later, no idea, but I hope to have more time for myself, my family, and the GARDEN later. But even then, it’s not too late to plant a hedge in front of the fence. I will have a fence anyway (due to the situation) because I don’t want to see the neighbor’s dog/cat crossing the garden while my son is in the garden, but they can’t even protect themselves from a fly.

"Rock garden" is not my thing either. It is currently spreading because it is low-maintenance and looks modern (again, mostly due to lack of time), but I think it’s not really that low-maintenance since a little bit of leaves or other debris looks very bad. In the end, everyone must decide for themselves.

If accessibility were not my top priority and I had a somewhat larger garden, I would prefer a natural garden. I have experienced that in my first life; I had bees, chickens, and a dog, raised tortoises and leeches, and insects and birds felt comfortable too. You can work endlessly in such a garden, but you can also leave it as it is—a natural garden. Above all, children in such gardens experience things they only see on TV nowadays, and they keep themselves busy naturally.

You will not keep cats away with a fence

The fence protects against dogs, but only against cats if it is not overgrown on both sides. I would remove some of the plants from the so-called [Vogelschutzhecken]. They are partly too prickly for animals and cats.

First, make a plan for what you want and where you want to place it in your garden. I believe there won’t be much left.

I don’t exactly consider rock gardens to be low-maintenance. They are easy to care for, yes, but the stones need to be kept clean. You can’t just quickly sweep over them with a broom. I find ground cover plants better for that.

1) I do not share the thujophobia either. Pretty plant. 2) The welded mesh fence is just a fence. If you don’t want a fence, then don’t have one. But if you do, why not this one? 3) Cats do not go to strangers. They are too shy for that.

The occasional visitor does not simply approach strangers. zizzis Kind is severely disabled, cats can sense that. The sensitive regular guest can already cuddle with the child. Keeping them away will be difficult

From the prairie garden I can report only good things:

Our basic conditions:
Clayey but unused soil, rectangular plot, a prairie bed strip about 1 m wide on two sides.

- Only in the first year did I have to weed more often. In the 2nd year, the planting largely suppressed the weeds on its own.
- After three weeks without any work, you can't see it on the beds at all.
- We only water the beds rarely now, last summer maybe once after about 3 weeks. The lawn consumed much more.
- Already in the first year, the prairie beds looked great, not half empty or scrawny. In the 2nd spring, we already had to cut back some plants quite a bit.
- I had planned a dry lawn. This grows slowly and only needs to be mowed 2-3 times in summer. But it likes to look somewhat patchy. When the garden was created, this material was replaced with common sports lawn. 90% of the garden work now goes into lawn care. It doesn’t look bad, but there would have been potential to save work time there.

Much joy with the garden
Gabriele