Low-maintenance does not mean no-maintenance, and the gap between those two is where most disappointment in a landscape lives.
What it actually means is that the plant is not fighting anything. It suits the soil it is in rather than tolerating it. It is not prone to the diseases that go around here. It is not going to outgrow its space and need cutting back twice a year. It does not depend on being pruned into a shape to look like anything. A plant that clears all of that needs very little from anybody.
What it still needs is water on a schedule for the first two seasons, water in a drought year after that, a feed occasionally, and somebody noticing if something changes. That is not a burden. It is also not nothing, and a customer told "low-maintenance" who heard "nothing" will conclude in year three that we sold them a difficult plant.
The honest framing is that low-maintenance is mostly a siting achievement rather than a plant property. The same shrub is low-maintenance in the right spot and a recurring problem twenty feet away in the wrong one.
