5 Foundation Garden Plants That You Just Can’t Kill

A beautiful garden around your home is essential for adding curb appeal and for many other practical reasons. Here are some of the best foundation garden plants if you want something that you just can’t kill.

Foundation garden plants are the essential design elements that make your home look finished and complete from the outside. It’s amazing how a 100-year-old house can still look like it’s not quite “done” when it doesn’t have a basic foundation garden surrounding it. Likewise, a brand new home can be made to feel instantly cozy, welcoming, and lived in with the right basic landscaping around it. Not only do foundation gardens help with curb appeal and charm, but they also help to camouflage exposed utility boxes and concrete foundations, and can even help prevent soil erosion while directing rainwater runoff away from your home.

Foundation gardens are especially important around decks and patios as well, to make them look finished and inviting. Look for deck builders who are also able to complete landscaping projects to help you plan the entire vision in a way that will work for you and the way you like to maintain your yard. For instance, search for something like “Deck Builders Windsor ON” and find a company with extensive experience in outdoor construction projects, landscaping, and garden design if this sounds like something you’d prefer not to DIY.

Planning for Your Foundation Garden

When it comes to planning your foundation garden, there are a few simple rules to follow that will help you create something that beautifies the outside of your home and works for you.

First, be mindful of the mature height and width of the perennials, trees, and shrubs that you choose. Aim to place taller plants near the back of the garden closest to the house, and layer shorter plants in front. This way, everything will look cohesive, tidy, and well-planned, even if things get a little overgrown from time to time.

Include a variety of different plants such a evergreen shrubs, deciduous hedges, blooming bushes, and perennials grown for both their flowers and foliage. Consider leaf size and color and try to have a mix of small leaves, larger foliage types, needles, and even grasses to keep things visually interesting.

Finally, consider the maintenance requirements of the plants you choose. If you enjoy spending time working on your garden, you may be comfortable with plants that require a little more care, but if you’d rather just plant once and not worry about it too much, search out plants that require minimal upkeep.

Yews

Yews are beautiful, lush evergreen shrubs commonly used as hedges or trimmed into focal point plants. They can be kept quite small and tidy, or allowed to grow into tall, towering shrubs to protect windows or act as a windbreak. Yews are an incredibly long-lived species (up to 900 years in some cases), so you can rest assured that healthy yews in your garden won’t ever need to be replaced.

Yews like to be watered very regularly during their first establishing season, and you may notice them drooping a bit for the frist few months during hot, dry weather, or when they’re in need of a drink. Once they’re established, though, they’re almost impossible to kill. In fact, you can cut a full-grown yew of 10-12 feet down to just a stump, and it will regrow into a healthy, compact little shrub full of fresh green needles within a couple of years.

Our newly-planted yews are pictured above on either side of our deck stairs. These will soon fill these entire beds so we’ve given them plenty of space to grow. We’ll trim them into tidy, rounded shapes when they mature a little bit further.

Boxwood

You may be surprised to find boxwood on this list. These classic shrubs are foundational garden staples that bring structure and year-round greenery to garden beds, but it’s also common to see newly planted boxwoods dying off. It’s not rare to see a tidy row of tiny boxwood shrubs lining a new front walkway, with half the boxwoods looking sad, crispy, and brown, giving a lot of people the impression that boxwoods are difficult to grow. The good news is that once you put the time and care into getting your boxwoods established, they become basically unkillable and live up to 100 years, through drought, extreme cold, and pest attacks without so much as one dropped leaf. They just need to be watered very consistently for the few little while.

Read my guide to getting boxwoods established here: How to Grow Healthy Boxwoods

Hostas

Hostas are herbaceous perennials, meaning they die back to nothing during the winter months. During the spring, summer, and fall, though, they fill large garden beds beautifully, providing structure, a graceful, rounded shape, and even a bit of color during bloom time in the summer and when their leaves turn a beautiful gold in the fall. You can divide hostas over and over again, move them, ignore them, forget to water them, and they’ll just keep coming back every year.

Hosta guidance for home gardeners: 7 Hosta Mistakes That Everyone Keeps Making

Forsythia

I believe every garden should have at least one forsythia. These common shrubs are vigorous growers and fill in quickly to add greenery to your garden from mid-spring through the fall months. They’re one of the earliest blooming spring plants, bringing a flush of cheerful yellow blooms right at the end of winter when you need them most. You can trim them back to almost nothing, and they’ll fill right back in with new branches and fresh green leaves before you can blink an eye.

The spring-blooming shrub every garden needs: How to Force Forsythia Branches

Peonies

Many people think of peonies only for their stunning late-spring blooms, but I appreciate them most for the lush greenery they bring to my garden throughout the rest of the growing season. These perennials die back during the winter months, then shoot up with fresh new leaves and stems every spring, keeping their beautiful shape and rich green color right through until fall.

Peonies are so tough and hardy that you can mow them down right to the ground over and over again, and they’ll still keep coming back over and over again for years unless you dig them up. If you’re looking for a rewarding plant that provides blooms and greenery, fills a lot of space in your garden, and will never let you down, a peony plant will be your best friend.

Creating more peony plants for your garden: When and How to Divide and Transplant Peonies

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