8 Inexpensive Garden Edging Ideas That Will Make Your Yard Look Sharp

Create a crisp, clean design within your landscaping using edging to outline various areas of your yard. Define designated growing areas from your flower beds to vegetable gardens. These inexpensive edging ideas will add character and texture to landscaping beds. With a few simple materials and an afternoon, you can use rustic bricks or concrete stones to outline any area.

Brick Garden Edging 

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.

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

Diagonal Brick Garden Edging 

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.

Flagstone Garden Edging 

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.

Rock Garden Edging 

Mix and match rock shapes and colors for a natural stone 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.

Cobblestone Garden Edging 

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

Garden Edging with Plants 

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.

Recycled-Bottle Garden Edging 

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.

Cast Concrete Edging 

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.

Courtesy of Better Homes & Gardens