Six robust plants for gardening beginners with a small budget and little time

With a handful of tough, reliable favourites, you can create a garden even with a modest budget and limited time.

Many people new to gardening end up disappointed: they make impulse purchases at the garden centre, spend heavily on spectacular flowers, and a few weeks later everything looks bare again. The site is unsuitable, the watering can is forgotten, or the soil is poor. Yet a small starter selection of particularly forgiving plants is often all that is needed. They cope with mistakes, hold their own and return year after year. This article focuses on six understated but exceptionally useful species.

Why these six plants make gardening less stressful for beginners

When starting out, it is easy to overestimate the amount of attention a flower bed requires. Constant watering, feeding and replanting is difficult to maintain alongside work, family and everyday life. Tough perennials and ground-cover plants make things far more manageable because they:

• cope well with ordinary garden soil.