Low Maintenance Pool Landscaping Plants 

Best Plants for Pool Landscaping

Low maintenance pool landscaping plants provide color and interest but they also free up your time so you spend less time caring for plants and more time having fun IN the swimming pool.

When landscaping swimming pools, owners (like us) are looking for plants that serve a purpose - like privacy - and are easy to maintain.

These mophead hydrangeas come back every year providing us with beautiful bouquets of flowers. They never get any kind of disease and I rarely even fertilize them - truly low maintenance. Be sure to trim them back right after they bloom (mid-late summer) so that you'll get blossoms the following year.

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I have Endless Summer hydrangeas that blossom all summer as well as regular Nikko blue.  The Endless Summer now comes in purple as well and get be purchased at Amazon...

Endless Summer Hydrangea BloomStruck (Reblooming Hydrangea) Shrub, RB purple, 3 - Size Container

Perennial Low Maintenance Pool Landscaping Plants

Perennials are plants that come back every year.  Unlike annuals that need to be planted every spring or summer. 

PeeGee Lime Light Hydrangea

A later blooming hydrangea - in early July - the PeeGee Limelight provides large, lime white blossoms that dry with tinges of pink.

I don't even fertilize mine and I don't water them like I should. But they still forgive me and and give forth blossoms that are picture perfect. Unlike my Nikko blue hydrangeas, these blossom on new growth so you can prune them in early spring.  They seem to thrive in the hot sun with very little watering.

Proven Winners - Hydrangea 'Limelight' (Panicle Hydrangea) Shrub, white/lime to pink flowers, 3 - Size Container

I love these hydrangeas and so do the deer. The ones inside the pool fence are protected - but those outside the fence get a good dose of Deer Scram granules.

Spread the granules around the base of your deer loving plants. This product worked for me and we have deer coming into our yard all the time.

Daylily Perennials

Plant daylily perennials around your pool for splashes of color. We prefer perennials to annuals even though annuals blossom for longer periods of time.  The low maintenance of daylilies wins out for us. 

Plant early, mid and late summer bulbs so that you have color through out the summer.

Purchase your day lilies at your local nursery or on line here:

Day Lily Bulbs

The best plants for pool landscaping are the ones that give you pleasure - for us it is these easy to grow and maintain dahlias.

And because they are perennials they come back every year.  You can choose from a variety of colors and different heights. 

Low Maintenance Pool Landscaping Plants with Fragrance

One of our favorite low maintenance pool landscaping plants is the gardenia.  These plants provide a wonderful fragrance as we walk past them to the pool.  Look for a low growing dwarf variety like the Crescent Moon. It mounds to about 2 feet tall and grows 3-4 feet wide.  

The pure white fragrant blooms flower in late spring through early summer. When not in blossom the dark shiny leaves provide year round greenery.

Colorful Bushes

One of my favorite bushes is this pink blossomed spirea. It adds great color to your landscaping and blossoms several times over the summer

It needs trimming maybe once or twice a year.

I also like that it doesn't grow out of control which makes it easy to maintain.

Shade Loving Low Maintenance Pool Landscaping Plants

Plant shade loving Hosta underneath trees or places that get some shade. Our hosta do get some sun. 

There are so many varieties of this plant - some small and some large ones. From variegated to solid color leaves, these low maintenance plants are perennials and come back every year.  When they get larger, you can split these shade lovers to find other areas to plant them.

Low Maintenance Landscaping with Hosta

We love the color and the months of blooms from shade loving impatience. 

You can choose from a variety of colors - red, pink, salmon, and white. 

Lots of Mulch

Use lots of mulch to help plants retain moisture and to help condition the soil.  

It means less watering and better yet, less weeds. Normally, we replace our mulch about every two years. About 2"- 3" of mulch will help keep your plants from drying out and weeds from coming up.

Low Maintenance Landscaping with the Right Tools

We are loving our Ryobi One+ rechargeable cordless blower.  No electric cords and no gas is needed.  We bought ours with the 18V lithium battery and battery charger.

You will find other Ryobe ONE+ tools and fans that can use the same ONE+ battery and charger.

The variable speed, the run time and the portability of this cordless blower has made it so much easier to keep our pool deck clean.

Greenworks 40V 150 MPH Variable Speed Cordless Leaf Blower, 2.0Ah Battery and Charger Included

Weed Control Fabric for Low Maintenance Landscaping

Taking down several trees around the pool means lots more sunshine which we like, but so do the weeds. I was surprised by how many more weeds started popping up around the perimeter of the pool with more sun.

One of the best things we did was to lay down commercial grade weed control fabric around the bushes and plants before we placed the fresh mulch.

One of the fabrics we bought from a hardware store said it was suppose to last 30 years! I'll probably never know if that's true, but I do know that it lets air and water get to the roots but doesn't let the weeds come up. We do alot less spraying for weeds.

The two fabrics we've used are Easy Gardener and Landmaster. They come in different lengths - 50' and 100' but most are 4' wide.

We've had these fabrics down for a couple of years and they really help to control the weeds. Less time pulling weeds and more time in the pool.

Landscape Fabric and Weed Barrier

Watering Plants and Pots

I have used this hose for 3 years now and it's the only hose that hasn't needed annual replacing.

What I like is that it is lightweight, not nearly as heavy as other hoses.  It is very flexible which means it doesn't kink as much as other hoses and when it does, a quick snap of the wrist and I can often unkink it.

It's a nylon hose that is phthalate, BPA and lead free and make of chrome plated zinc fittings  - which means no leaking at the faucet.  The picture shows a purple hose - but you can get it in a nice mossy green - which is the one I purchased.

Featherweight Garden Hose, 100'

Shade or Low Maintenance

We got tired of the messy pine needles. As soon as we had the pool area all blown, the pine needles would drop so fast and thick that by the next day, the mess was back.

So this fall we decided to take down the remaining pine trees that surrounded the pool area even though it meant that we would lose some shade.

Fewer trees means not only less leaves and pine needles on the pool deck but in the baskets and pool cleaner as well.

Some days we would have to empty the baskets twice a day and the pool cleaner at least once a day. During the fall, the leaves and needles would need to be scooped out with the pool leaf net daily.

Fewer Trees for Low Maintenance Landscaping

When we were first building our pool our landscaper recommended that we remove more trees, but we resisted.  Well, we should have listened.  The trees, although they provided nice shade on hot days, they prevented our pool water from heating up.

They were dropping pine needles, leaves, sugar gums and all other kinds of stuff it seemed year round always making a mess of our pool deck.

This summer we are looking forward to less maintenance of the landscaping. Each year we try to replace plants that are too high maintenance - plants that are prone to disease, need lots of watering or fertilizing. However, the biggest help has been taking down trees around the pool area.

So if your landscape designer suggests that you take down more trees when you put in your pool, listen to him so you can enjoy low maintenance landscaping around your pool.

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