The Many Uses of Landscape Edging

Landscape edging is useful for a variety of reasons within your yard or garden. There are a large variety of styles to choose from, but landscape edging is not always used just for decoration. It's often handy to help separate various areas of your yard, contain invasive plants, or keep the grass out of flower or tree beds. Let's look at several ways landscape edging can be both useful and beautiful in your yard.

1. Around trees - Using landscape edging around your trees can help keep the grass, ground covers, or other vines and plants from invading the space designated just for your trees. These plants can sometimes steal the water your trees need, before that water is able to soak deeply enough into the ground to be beneficial to the trees. So putting landscape edging around your trees is an excellent way to make the yard look much more professionally finished, but it also helps your trees to grow strong and healthy.

Try putting your landscape edging several feet away from the trunks of the trees, then fill the interior area with a nice looking mulch or bark to give it a finishing touch. This bark and mulch will also help protect your trees from drying out too quickly in the summer, or being damaged by cold in the winter.

2. Around your yard - Using landscape edging around the border of a simple grass yard helps it looks more valuable and attractive, without adding the additional maintenance and water needs that comes with putting in plants, flowers, bushes or trees.

An added bonus of putting landscape edging around your grass yard, is that the grass will not be able to invade your walkways as easily, and keeping the edges trimmed is also much easier when you have edging in place too.

3. Around flower beds - Landscape edging is an excellent way to section off various areas of your yard and garden for specific plants or flowers. If you like having showy annual flowers along your walkway for instance, putting some decorative landscape edging on the outside of those is a quick and easy way to dress things up a bit.

Alternatively, if you have flower beds in place already, say in front of the house, you can make them look more elegant and upscale by simply placing a nice edging around what's already there.

If you don't want trees or bushes in your yard, or you want the yard to look pretty and finished quickly, try putting circular or other stylish arrangements of landscape edging in the middle of your yard, then planting some pretty, colorful flowers which bloom all season. You can even use landscape edging to make raised flower beds too.

Regardless of where you decide to put your landscape edging, you can make it more interesting and unique by putting in in various shapes. A standard square or circle is fine of course, but you'll add much more interest and class to your yard by creating a figure eight shape around a few trees for instance, or creating a curvy, snake like design along the edge of a flower bed or around the outside of your yard.