less work and so much prettier 😍

Less work? 🤣

I had a garden with wild flowers, it was planted by the previous owner. An horticulturist.

It was beautiful but required a lot of work. Way more than mowing a couple of days a week.

I still tried to keep up, though.

Damn, mowing a couple of days a week? Ffs

Yay more animals for my dog to terrorize! /s

I live on the side of a hill so we have lots of wild plants, trees, shrubs, etc. So many birds and little creatures here. Occasionally a bobcat will stroll through. Owls, cranes, and quails are fun to see. There are mountain lions in the area but thankfully we have not seen any on our cameras. I love the ecosystem around my house. The sound of the coyotes howling in the night or the birds starting to chirp as the sun starts to rise...so blissful.

Definitely not less work if you want it looking like that lol

Came here to ask what plants grow like that with less work

Much prettier and I love birds, but on what planet is the bottom one less work? Every one of those plants requires maintenance.

damn you're lucky if it's that easy to keep a lawn that lush and full in your area
keeping a shitty grass lawn is easy, keeping one perfectly manicured is not
- I've been told they're very low maintenance as long as you have some clovers in there. I've never maintained a lawn myself though, so no experience to draw on.

I love native alternatives to lawns, but OP, I feel like it'd be more environmentally friendly if you didn't trap the birds who visit your yard inside white void spheres. Please let them out. They don't deserve this fate.

It's only one of each, there are plenty more to come.

I wouldn't say it's less work, but it's well worth it.

I've been breaking my back over something closer to the bottom image for about 10 years. It's not less work. It's real easy to just drown a yard in water, crossbow, and fertilizer and mow once a week. I don't want to do that, so that's why I put the effort in.

I planted some rosemary, thyme and sage. Seems pretty low effort to me and they make food.
I think it's dependent on where you live to be honest. Lawns aren't native in my area, and are easily overtaken by other non-native plants. If you xeriscape or create a native garden it can be easier, or at least the same amount of work to maintain after it gets established.
Where I'm at, lawns quickly get overtaken with numerous types of (non-native) weeds and blackberries - it's a constant fight to maintain a lawn. Sprinkler systems are also not common here, so you typically have to manually water an entire lawn by hand as opposed to specific plants with drip lines.
- I do no work at all to my property, other than a small area around the house that we walk. I have a family of deer that spends most of their day relaxing in my yard.
Agree. If you let nature take care of your yard, it definitely won't look like the bottom pic.
Is...is the crossbow for the snakes?
- It's a selective herbicide

I started having the guy who mows my grass leave one small back section of the property untouched so I could hopefully attract more native birds and insects. It's a part of my yard that I don't go into and neither do my dogs, so I figured it was as good a spot as any for the experiment. After a couple months, it worked to bring in birds. I have a pair of bluejays with a nest in my tree. I hadn't seen bluejays anywhere around before now, and I've lived in my house for 3 years.

HOAs are responsible for this. Fuck HOAs. All my homies hate HOAs.

Amount of work depends on if you're trying to live in a naturally hostile environment (a desert) or a more temperate climate.

If the plants are native, the environment isn't hostile.
- If your environment has native plants, it isn't hostile to... YOU? Or the native plants?
  Because constructing a society in a hostile environment and living successfully doesn't change the natural environment from being hostile to humans.
  I like to think of it this way: if you got lost away from society in that climate/environment, how much would it suck to try to survive, from scratch, for a year?

Live in one of those "rural suburbs" (line of houses surrounded by fields) in Louisiana.

Was smokin a bowl outside last night. Saw the mosquito truck come down the road, spraying a fog of insecticides to keep the population down and all I can think is "if we didn't flatten everything for miles around with empty lawns and mono crops, we'd still have enough dragonflies to eat the mosquitoes instead of spraying chemicals into our air that kill the dragonflies too"

The mosquito truck?? Far out
- Yea, that's what we call it around here. Just a regular truck with an IBC of insecticides and a low-pressure sprayer that drives around once a week to kill the swarms of mosquitoes along with every other insect in the area.

Hey, maybe I like getting sweaty and triggering my allergies with cut grass every weekend. Did you ever think I might like being miserable?

I hated cutting my parents' lawn so much as a teen. Absolutely awful experience.

This post brought to you by the anti Robin gang.

Ducking HOA Nazis will not allow.

Gotta watch out for Lyme disease though. 😢

Bottom is really good. But some of the plants are too close to the path

I'd rather some more of it be human food, but maybe that's out back. I'm slowly turning areas around the house I just bought into native stuff and food. It is, however, a constant battle against kudzu strangling and bamboo encroaching. I generally avoid having anything that tall and unkept (as some areas look to be) due to venomous snakes that can bite when surprised :/

Is it bamboo or knotweed?
Kudzu is hell. That is a battle you can’t win without fighting every day for quite a while.
An old buddy of mine spent 30 years fighting it back up the mountain behind his house. He died in 2020 and his house is draped in kudzu today.
- It's bamboo common here in rural Japan. We have two types, one of which has edible shoots in the spring so there's that at least. It does hold the ground together along the riverbank so I never plan on fully ripping it up; last thing I need is for a chunk of my property to slide off in the next big quake.

I would use the lawn mower width for a path and border on the property line. Of course and I would sprinkle a shit ton of clover seed on the path to mow less.

I guess OP enjoy swarmed by bugs and spiders

Pollinators are good, though. So.. yes?
- I have lots of bees in my garden. It certainly works.
- And spiders are great against flies and mosquitos
You should go out at night and shine a flashlight across lawn surface. The spider eyes are like stars.
You won't be getting less arthropods. Only a lower diversity of them.
For example. Most people in my city do it like the above. And 93% of the houses still have highly venomous Gaucho spiders. On the other hand since I'm trying to have a garden like the below, my garden has less of them but more of completely harmless stuff - garden spiders, native bees, crickets, butterflies, and the likes.

I prob have something similiar to bottom pic, and I would say it is much easier to maintain than a grasslawndessert. I have some garden paths and spots that I trim down, and cut down bushes when they get to big once a year, but never use a lawnmower or bother about weeds. Mosquitos are less now that I have more birds, a tawny owl is living in a hollow tree close to my compost and takes care of rodents. Dug a pond and got lots of frogs that also eats insects.

Totally true! 👍 So much prettier! 🥰

plus you can go birding from your living room (out the window)

Bonus not having to mow the lawn.