A genuinely low-maintenance garden comes down to a few deliberate choices made early, rather than a single trick, and this site's own plant database is a useful place to check which plants actually qualify rather than guessing.
The biggest single lever is favouring perennials and natives over high-maintenance annuals and vegetables. Vegetables and many annual flowers need constant attention through their growing season, regular watering, feeding, succession sowing and pest checking, because they're bred and grown to produce a lot in a single short season and need consistent input to do it. Perennials and natives, by contrast, establish once and then keep going with far less ongoing input. This site tags plants directly with a "low-maintenance" goal for exactly this reason, and the list is genuinely useful to shop from: perennial flowers like lavender, agapanthus, dahlia and geranium, and natives like harakeke (New Zealand flax), hebe and mānuka, are all tagged low-maintenance in the plant database, alongside a long list of other native and perennial trees and shrubs. Building a garden mostly from a list like that, rather than mostly from vegetables and bedding annuals, cuts down dramatically on the week-to-week attention the garden demands.
perennial flowers like lavender, agapanthus, dahlia and geranium, and natives like harakeke (New Zealand flax), hebe and mānuka, are all tagged low-maintenance in the plant database
Mulching is the second lever, and it works on two fronts at once. A layer of mulch suppresses weeds by blocking light to weed seeds near the soil surface, cutting down on one of the more time-consuming recurring jobs in any garden, and it slows moisture loss from the soil, which reduces how often beds need watering. This site's dedicated mulching guide covers the different mulch types and how to apply them properly; the relevant point for a low-maintenance garden is simply that a well-mulched bed asks for weeding and watering noticeably less often than bare soil does.
The third lever is choosing drought-tolerant plants deliberately, rather than by accident. Lavender, hebe and mānuka are all genuine examples from this site's own plant database: each is tagged with low water needs as well as being tagged low-maintenance, meaning they cope with dry spells without needing frequent watering to stay healthy. Choosing plants like these for the bulk of a garden, rather than moisture-hungry plants that sulk the moment watering lapses, cuts down on watering demand directly rather than relying on mulch alone to do that job.
None of this means a low-maintenance garden has to be plain or empty. Perennials and natives flower reliably, come back year after year without replanting, and many, like harakeke and mānuka, also bring in tūī, bellbirds and native bees. The trade-off is simply that a garden built mostly from these plants asks far less of you week to week than one built mostly from vegetables and annual bedding flowers, which is exactly the point for anyone short on time.