It'll soon be time to cut back flowers, hedges and shrubs, and you may end up with a massive pile of rubbish. You can’t compost some of it; besides, you’d never cram it all into your compost bin. There isn’t enough room in the your green wheelie bin and who wants to lug it all to a recycling centre?

It's too late for this year, but the solution might be to change some of your plantings and choose specimens that will produce less waste in the first place.

Start by replacing bedding plants with perennials. This will drastically reduce your rubbish because you won’t have to clear away annuals. There’s a wonderful choice of herbaceous perennials that flower for weeks, last for years and often need very little pruning.

Many perennials do two supplementary jobs by having interesting foliage and producing eye-catching seedheads after flowering. Take eryngiums, Sedum spectabile, alliums and astilbes. There’s no tidying up at the back end because you simply leave them alone. Let the leaves rot down over the winter and tidy any dead stems in February or March, when you don’t have much else for the compost bin.

And why not choose perennials that taste as good as they look, such as globe artichoke or sea kale? Try nose-tingling flowers to use as a garnish: hemerocallis Lemon Bells, roses, Viola odorata, elderflower or dianthus. Or do yourself and your bees a favour by planting herbs. Grow rosemary for early flowers, marjoram for ones in high summer and mint for early autumn.

Large woody branches and twigs can also be a nightmare and, again, you can avoid facing these by planting slow-growing trees. Check before you buy and ask about a plant’s final height and spread. Some species of hawthorn, sorbus, viburnum and acers never get too big, so should work for most gardens. As a bonus, they need very little pruning.

The same applies to fruit trees. Varieties are always grafted on to rootstocks which determine their final height. So choose M9 or M27 for apples, quince C for pears, and pixy for plums. And by pruning in the summer, you control growth and encourage good fruiting spurs for the following year. These summer prunings are green and sappy, so they're easy to shred or chop up and compost.

Clippings from hedges, especially overgrown and long-neglected ones, can be as daunting as big branches. As ever, a regular annual haircut solves the problem. You don’t even have to buy a shredder for these sappy prunings. A rotary mower will easily chop them up. Make a small pile on the grass and gently lower the lawnmower on to the pile, taking care not to strain the engine by doing this too quickly. The shreddings can then be composted.

For a new hedge, always choose slow-growing species: Chamaecyparis lawsoniana Ellwood’s Gold only grows by 20cm a year, but the dreaded leyland cypress soars upwards at the rate of 80-100cm annually.

Go for a well-behaved, low-growing hedging plant. You’ll have much less work to do and hardly any clippings. There are plenty to choose from: box, berberis, deutzia and thuja varieties, such as Thuja occidentalis Smaragd.

Inevitably your choice will depend on what you want the hedge to do. If you’re after privacy, buy an evergreen, such as holly or yew. To make an impenetrable barrier, try hawthorn and blackthorn. But if you’d like a low hedge to define different parts of the garden, lavender and box are worth considering. And, as a self-confessed foodie, I’d always recommend a trained soft fruit hedge for this.

There’s no shortage of shrubs that won't give you a headache. Mahonia, daphnes, chaenomeles, euonymus, skimmia and shrubby loniceras grow slowly and don’t need pruning. I planted Syringa meyeri Palibin in 2007 and have never pruned it, while Viburnum davidii was only trimmed back from a path after six years.