A courtyard garden is a gift and a trap. It is private, sheltered and quick to fill, but it also has more wall than floor, less rainfall reaching the soil than you think, and a habit of turning every shortcut into a job. Get the layout right in the first place and you can have four seasons of interest for perhaps ten minutes of work a week. Get it wrong and you will spend every summer evening dragging a hose around a space the size of a dining table.

The trick is to treat the courtyard as a room rather than a border. Decide how you want to use it, where you will sit, where you will store things, and how much of it you realistically want to plant, then design backwards from there.

Start With the Bones of the Layout

Sketch the space from the kitchen window as well as from inside the garden, because for most of the year you will look at it through glass. Three zones usually do the work: a seating area, a planting area, and a small working strip for a tap, a bin store and a lockable box for tools.

• Keep a main path at least 900mm wide, ideally 1.1m, so you can move pots and wheel a barrow without squeezing.
• Confine planting to two sides rather than dotting it around the edge. One continuous bed is far easier to water and weed than four narrow ones.
• Give the eye one focal point — a single large pot, a small tree, a piece of wall art — and keep everything else quiet.
• Place seating against a boundary wall or fence, which acts as a windbreak and holds warmth into the evening.

Repeat the materials you use. Two paving types, one gravel and one pot colour looks considered; six of everything looks like a car boot sale.

Choose Surfaces That Can Take Neglect

This is where most low-maintenance plans are won or lost. Grass is out: small lawns wear to mud, need edging and demand more water than anything else in the garden.

• Porcelain paving is the least demanding option. It is dense, so algae and moss struggle to get a grip, and it can be hosed clean in minutes. Large slabs mean fewer joints, and joints are where weeds live.
• 20mm gravel over a woven geotextile is cheap, quick and softens the sound of the space. Rake it once a year and top it up every few years.
• Decking works well in shade but needs an annual clean and a grip strip where it gets wet.

Whatever you lay, keep a fall of about 1:80 away from the house and make sure water has somewhere to go. A small channel or a soakaway in a planting bed is far better than a puddle at the back door.

Plant Like It Might Not Rain for a Fortnight

Courtyard plants deal with two contradictory problems: rain shadow from walls, and reflected heat from paving. Choose plants that shrug off both, and plant them closely enough that the soil surface is shaded by leaves.

• Mediterranean shrubs and herbs: lavender, rosemary, thyme, cistus, sage and teucrium.
• Long-flowering perennials: salvia, verbena, hardy geranium, sedum, echinacea and geum.
• Grasses: stipa, carex and ophiopogon, which need nothing but a spring comb-through.
• Bulbs: alliums and narcissi, planted once and left to repeat.

Then mulch the whole bed with 5cm of gravel or coarse bark. It cuts evaporation, suppresses weeds and keeps slugs away from soft growth. Water new plants through their first summer and after that, most will manage on rainfall alone.

Let Containers Water Themselves

Pots dry out faster than any border, so make them work harder. Self-watering containers with a built-in reservoir are the single best investment for a busy courtyard, and the bigger the pot, the less often you will fill it. Aim for 30cm across or more.

• Use a loam-based compost mixed with a third grit, and add water-retaining granules to the lower half.
• Top the compost with gravel so water evaporates more slowly and squirrels stop digging.
• Group pots together. Clustered containers shade each other and lose far less moisture than pots spaced out along a wall.
• Favour glazed or plastic pots over unglazed terracotta, which wicks water away from the roots.

Position every pot within reach of the tap, or fit a simple drip line on a timer if you are away often. Carrying cans across a courtyard is the chore that quietly kills enthusiasm.

Build in Seasonal Interest Once, Then Let It Repeat

Winter structure matters more in a courtyard than anywhere else, because you see it up close. Include a few evergreens — hebe, sarcococca, skimmia, ivy trimmed into shape — plus one small tree in a large pot for height and privacy.

Add spring bulbs, summer perennials and a shrub or two for autumn colour, then resist the urge to tidy everything away in October. Seedheads and grasses left standing look good in frost and feed the birds.

Keep the Weekly Chores Under Ten Minutes

• Spring: cut back last year's growth, top-dress pots, refresh gravel mulch, plant bulbs if you missed autumn.
• Summer: deadhead, refill reservoirs twice a week in hot spells, trim anything flopping over the path.
• Autumn: sweep paving, clear leaves from gravel with a soft rake, plant bulbs and any new shrubs.
• All year: keep secateurs, a hand hoe and a watering can in a box by the door so small jobs get done in passing.

That is the whole discipline: good surfaces, generous pots, tough plants and a layout you can walk through without turning sideways. Do that once and the courtyard becomes somewhere to sit rather than somewhere to work.