Border Garden Beds For More Color And Less Care - By: Steve Boulden

Border garden beds are wonderful additions to your landscape when you want to highlight an edge, such as a driveway, fence, walkway, front porch, or patio. They can be used to delineate visual boundaries or create physical compartments in your landscape. When it comes to highlighting permanent features, such as a trellis or gazebo, or dividing spaces in your yard or vegetable garden, border gardens are just the thing. As they often follow an edge, they are usually rectangular in shape, but can also be designed to include gentle curves for less formal gardens.

Most gardeners plant taller annuals and perennials to the back of these beds, placing shorter items towards the front. Border beds can be created to spotlight long seasons of bloom on a continuum or focused around a one-season spectacular show. If you opt for the one-season showcase, be sure to plan the rest of your landscaping to balance out the seasons during which your border bed lies fallow.

Nearby shrubs, ground cover, and ornamental grasses can help your yard to that regard and can offer visual interest and texture year-round. I prefer to choose interesting foliage, such as hostas and alumroots, and long-lasting blooms like coreopsis. A good border, unless it is full of wild perennial plantings, should not be more than several feet in width; more than that, its width makes the bed difficult to tend, weed, and maintain.

Longer border beds, such a forest or yard borders against a fence wider than four feet, should be broken up into segments with a break or stepping stones every several yards for foot traffic and for maintenance. Keep in mind if your lawnmower or wheelbarrow will need to pass through these breaks when you are planning your border bed. An important facet of border beds is their edging. If they are in your vegetable garden, paths and access to all areas takes precedence, making edging less necessary.

I've found see-through edging, such as ornamental wire or wood, larger rounded stones, and/or scallop shells can add punch to your vegetable garden border beds. Mowing is not necessary, so you can be more creative. If your beds are complements to your yard, however, you need to be sure that mowing your lawn will not damage any lovely plantings and blooms. If near a fence, leave enough room between it and your edging for any fence maintenance. Embedded brick, cobblestone, or smaller flagstone borders work well for border beds in areas which receive regular lawn mowing; the lawnmowers wheels can flow right over the embedded edges without harming your garden and reduce the need for after-mow trimming of weeds.

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