Garden and Landscaping Edging Ideas

Brick is a common landscape edging choice: It's classic, widely available, and relatively inexpensive. Push bricks tightly together to minimize spaces between them that turf can slip through. To prevent heaving and unevenness in your garden edging, set your bricks in a bed of sand.

Note: If you set the brick just above the soil, you can use it as a mowing strip, running your lawn mower's wheel right over the brick. This eliminates the need for trimming.

Lay old, mismatched bricks on the diagonal for a 19th-century domino effect in your garden edging. Dig a trench and add several inches of sand for drainage so the bricks don't heave. Set the bricks in the trench, half exposed, leaning tightly one against the next, then fill in with soil. If you are edging several garden beds, lean all the bricks in the same direction.

Concrete garden edging eases mowing, and its serpentine shape creates a winding path through the landscape shown here. Varying heights add interest and allow for a smooth transition on a slope or uneven landscape.

Edging your landscaping garden beds with flagstone lends a classic look that's particularly well-suited to country and cottage gardens. Flagstone is available in a number of colors and thicknesses so you can easily use it to coordinate or contrast your plants, other stonework in the landscape, or even stonework on your house. Irregular in shape, flagstones are durable and stack securely in the yard.

Mix and match rock shapes and colors for a natural garden edge. Large multicolor rocks complement this landscape's informal style. Positioned in a winding pattern, the round boulders allow sweet alyssum to creep over and between the rocks, creating a lacy, scalloped look in this landscaped flower bed.

Square cobbles of granite garden edging combine with a hedge of Korean boxwood to give this landscape shape. 'Annabelle' and oakleaf hydrangeas add billowing blooms of white, their large leaves contrasting with the textures and shapes of the paving, edging, and hedge.

Low, mounding plants can be a fantastic landscaping garden edging choice. When planted in one long mass of draping color, low-growing plantings of sweet alyssum (shown here), veronica, bouncing bet, artemisia, coralbells, or candytuft soften hard edges and add a splash of color.

Edge your landscape in colored-glass bottles to infuse your yard with a funky, down-home look. Bury the bottles neck down, side-by-side in the soil to use as garden edging. To keep turf or weeds from migrating from your lawn into your beds, sink a sheet of aluminum flashing about 8 inches into the ground alongside the bottles.