15 No-Fuss Garden Plans Filled with Plants That Thrive in Full Sun

Choose from our free, downloadable, low-maintenance garden plans for greenery and color in your yard.

Viveka Neveln is the Garden Editor at BHG and a degreed horticulturist with broad gardening expertise earned over 3+ decades of practice and study. She has more than 20 years of experience writing and editing for both print and digital media.

Use one of these free, no-fuss garden plans you can download for a beautiful sunny garden that doesn't require much maintenance. Each one relies on easy-care, sun-loving plants that will provide color and texture throughout the growing season.

Water-Wise Garden

You won't have to worry about dragging the hose around to water this garden during the summer. It's filled with heat- and drought-tolerant plants such as sedum, feather reed grass, and euphorbia that can withstand extended dry spells. This layered garden plan works well as a foundation planting or in front of a fence.

Beautiful Heat-Tolerant Garden

This high-impact, low-care garden plan keeps your yard looking fantastic even through heat waves. It features a variety of summer-blooming favorites such as salvias, irises, and zinnias. Fill a corner of your yard with this garden design for a big display of brightly colored flowers and foliage.

Colorful Curbside Garden

Turn the space between the street and your sidewalk into an oasis of color with fuss-free native perennials and ornamental grasses. Plants such as purple coneflower, baptisia, goldenrod, and aster will boost your yard's curb appeal with hardly any effort on your part.

Tough-as-Nails Perennial Garden

Russian sage, lavender, and catmint are sure bets for an easy-care garden plan. These tough plants mix with perennials to produce beautiful bursts of pink, yellow, and purple all summer. The variety of heights makes this garden perfect for flower beds against fences.

Heat-Loving Flower Garden

Some plants shut down in hot weather. But the varieties in this garden plan continue to shine in the baking sun, so you can enjoy a brilliant patchwork of color no matter what the weather's like. Dahlias and lilies are the backbones of this garden, offering bold blooms—they're perfect for cutting!—throughout the summer.

Front Yard Corner Garden

Banish front yard blahs by installing this corner fence garden of fast-growing flowers. Packed with sun-loving selections, the design features a mix of colorful annuals punctuated with just a few perennials. Cheery black-eyed Susan complements easy-care cosmos, penstemon, butterfly bush, and more in this long-blooming garden plan.

Small-Space, Easy-Care Sunny Garden

Enjoy loads of beautiful color all season long with this simple garden plan. It features no-fuss favorites such as coreopsis and purple coneflowers. This garden will thrive and bloom through even the warmest summer weather.

Beat-The-Heat Summer Garden

This ultra-easy garden plan will shine all summer, even as the mercury climbs. This design includes a variety of flowering perennials that don't need much care from you. Just find a sunny spot that needs some cheery color and start digging.

No-Fail Annual Garden

Annual gardens are a fun way to add brilliant colors lasting from spring to frost. In this design, a blue morning glory on a trellis or similar plant support structure in the center of the bed serves as a focal point. The rich color of its blooms is complemented and contrasted by the surrounding annual flowers.

Easy-Care Perennial Garden

Nonstop color is what this garden plan is all about, thanks to the drought-tolerant perennials in it. You'll enjoy their palette of pink, purple, yellow, and white flowers from spring to fall because when one variety finishes flowering, another takes its place.

Clay Soil Garden

Gardening in clay soil can be challenging because this type of earth drains poorly after rain, then dries to a concrete-like surface. But this garden plan for clay soil will make it possible for you to enjoy a colorful, thriving garden all the same.

Carefree Late-Summer Garden

Sun-loving, summer-blooming perennials keep the color coming on strong through the end of the growing season in this no-fuss garden plan. Their seed heads also add some winter interest while providing a source of food for birds that don't fly away to warmer climates.

Beginner Perennial Garden

This easy garden plan is designed for beginning or time-constrained gardeners and features some of the best low-care perennials you can grow. These reliable plants will come back every year and don't require much care other than occasional deadheading.

Low-Care Fall Garden

End your growing season with a bang with this simple garden plan. It features colorful mums, asters, and other easy-care fall favorites that heat up as the weather cools. Along with the beautiful flowers adding color to the landscape, this design relies on foliage like the silvery gray of lamb's ears and the cool hues of blue fescue to brighten the autumn scene.

Easy Slope Garden Plan

Solve a tough-to-mow slope with this easy-care garden plan. It combines colorful annuals and perennials into a gorgeous display that will bloom from spring to fall.

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