The Best Plants To Keep Your Garden Looking Full On A Budget

Landscaping is a beautiful way to make your yard come alive with color and texture. It adds some serious curb appeal and makes your home feel more inviting and finished. But as anyone who has gardened before will know, it's also expensive. That's why it's a good idea to choose plants that will make your garden look full on a budget.

Landscaping a full yard will likely cost you thousands of dollars, but bushy perennial plants can help you work around that. Their broad leaves and wide, mounding nature will help you fill up more space faster, allowing you to buy less. Plants like these include hostas, black-eyed Susans, irises, and coral bells. These plants return each year and have either wide, plentiful leaves or proliferating flower buds. They like to spread out once they get established, and they are low-maintenance to care for. And best of all, these perennials can be split and divided in order to propagate in other areas of your yard, giving you more bang for your buck.

Let's take a deeper look at hostas and coral bells, which are great additions to the shady spots in your yard. Hostas are super hardy plants that are low-maintenance and can seemingly survive just about anywhere. Put them in full shade or partial sun — they'll be happy wherever they are. Hostas are frost-tolerant and do well in poor soil. Once they're established, you will only need to water them during scorching summer days. And best of all, their leaves are big and broad, giving you lots of ground cover.

Coral bells also like the shade, and much like hostas, their foliage is a major draw. These bushy plants can come in color varieties such as bright green, purple, or red, adding a pop of color to your landscaping. They have tall, bell-shaped blooms that sprout between the leaves, attracting hummingbirds to your yard. They're also pretty low-maintenance, requiring only weekly watering, and they do well in almost any soil type.

If you want to focus on flowers, then you can't go wrong with black-eyed Susans and irises for ample ground cover. Black-eyed Susans are flowering perennials with black centers and yellow petals, though they can come in different shades. They're drought-tolerant, and they spread across the garden bed as they return each year. Black-eyed Susans also love full sun, so you won't have to worry about them scorching. They can also handle lots of humidity and tolerate almost any soil, making them unfussy.

Irises are another beautiful-blooming, spreading perennial. They grow tall, adding visual depth to your yard, and they enjoy full sun, so you can put them in the sunniest spot you've got. Irises like moist soil, and you will need to deadhead them immediately for blooms all season long. But they will take up large swaths of space with their bushy leaves and stunning blooms, helping you get more bang for your buck each summer.