Not too Edgy, but our Edgers are our Own Style

Gardeners have varied styles, much more than there are varieties of garden styles. The style, and to a degree, the personality of the gardener can be seen in the mixing and matching, and planning of the gardener’s plants. So do the details, like in the choice of the edging of the garden.

Broken pieces of concrete lend informality to the planting. The texture of the concrete edging echoes that of the circular steppingstones to give cohesiveness to the mismatched materials.

Edging your garden with found objects, recycled or upcycled, gives you unlimited and unique ways to show your style and your personality. Your options are endless.

In this blog story, allow me to share our edging styles, our way: the thrifty yet eye-catching way. In the next blog story, I’ll write on the man-made kinds of edging, more beautiful and much more expensive.

Used drain pipes can be re-purposed as garden edgers

REPURPOSE. We use broken concrete slabs to edge our back garden towards our neighbor’s house. It gives this section of our garden an informal look and some cohesion where a mixture of hydrangeas, cedar bushes, rhododendrons, Japanese aralia, and hostas dominate the planting on one side of the pathway while a mixture of mainly fragrant flowering bushes and perennials occupy the side of the pathway towards our neighbor’s deck.

The collection of fragrant-blooming perennials is for our elderly neighbor’s enjoyment as she regularly sits on her deck to get early morning and late afternoon sun and listens to the songs of the many birds on her mature pine trees.

The edging of our side garden is made of old drain pipes standing in a double row along the common fence with our neighbor. The rows of drain pipes serve as a barrier to prevent the neighbor’s invasive lamium groundcover to spread into our garden. The ceramic drain pipes can also be planted with succulents since the ceramic allows good drainage needed by succulents.

Plants with draping habit, like hosta and hakone grass, are excellent natural edgers

EDGING AS GREEN AS CAN BE. Hostas and Japanese hakonecloa or forest grass serve as the edging planting in our front berm along a side street. The combination planting looks natural and eye-catching from mid-spring to mid-fall, while the rest of the year the defoliated hostas and forest grass reveal a neat curve of bare dark brown earth. This area hosts rows of sunshiny yellow daffodils and multi-colored tulips that work as edging in early spring before the hostas and the Japanese forest grass display their new growth to take over the role of natural and living edging.

Caged-in rocks and sawed-off 4 x 4 lumber can create a unique gabion edging.

UPCYCLE. Try gabion which is a wire cage or mesh filled with rocks or gravel to create unique edging of some sort. Incorporate blocks of wood to add to the uniqueness and beauty.

Our edgers, whether of re-purposed materials or of plants, provide a barrier for weeds and the lawn mower as well as create a visual divider around the flower beds and our turf grass.

Blue wine bottles can be colorful and appealing as edgers (ctto: Lark Kolikowskis@www.fleamarketgardening.org)

ROYAL BLUE DAZZLERS. We’ve been collecting colored wine bottles (royal blue, our favorite color), hoping to create shiny edging. We plan to bury about halfway those blue wine bottles around the edge of one of our roadside beds. Or maybe along our back garden where naughty kids can’t see them and be tempted to throw rocks at the glass display.

We just haven’t collected enough empty wine glasses to edge the whole stretch of that part of our garden since we’re not regular alcohol consumers. But if desperate enough to finish this project, we can swing by a glass recycling depot, I suppose.

I can already visualize the glass edging adding interesting color, shape, and dazzle to our garden, especially when sunlight dances on the glass bottles. What an edgy edger that will be.