Landscape Edging Is The Gardener’s Frame

Creating borders, or landscape edging, for flower beds and other areas of your garden can add a number of qualities and have a surprising effect upon the way you look at and experience your garden. It is not for everyone. Some gardeners prefer the natural transition from one area into another to be unannounced; and either spend a lot of time clearing those edges to keep them clear or else allow them to blend and blur as growth interferes with the lines of demarcation. But other gardeners and designers see these borders as an opportunity for expression and comment; a creative opportunity to enhance what has been worked so hard to achieve.

Edging, of any kind, whether with physical borders of added material or else the frequent clearing and cutting to restate the lines, is an exercise of determination; the gardener has laid out his plan and restates his identity upon the garden’s growth. A border of brick around a dirt flower bed surrounded by grass is an artificial construct in the belly of nature. The garden is nature sculpted into the forms of a gardener’s desire. The celebration of nature by a man or woman by enhancing it with shapes and forms it would never have produced alone. Nature has no edge but a garden requires them; they are a gardener’s work to insist upon over and over again.

In many ways a border might also be called a frame. We call it an edge, or a border; yet what they also do is frame a creation and as a picture frame may be a thing of beauty or interest in and of itself then so can a garden border be. The material you use to border or frame your flower bed says something about you, about your flower bed and about your ideas on gardening. Natural materials such as old wood or found stones and rocks render an organic effect; although they are contrived and placed quite deliberately they have the effect of causing us to wonder if nature itself is its own frame. Whereas the angular brick or two by four painted wood blocks placed orderly and neatly seem to imply that a mind has been at work, a plan created and executed: that this garden is tamed.

When gardening, as in all creative pursuits, we tend to focus upon the love we feel from the activity or environment in which we work; we may get lost in some way in the work itself and see that as the end, the reason for doing. Yet each decision we make is an execution of our will and becomes a mirror of our minds in our work. Landscape edging is such a decision, minor perhaps; but appealing by its innocent reflection of our aesthetic pleasure.