Garden Edging and Garden Paths

As great as a garden that completely imitates nature might seem, few gardens look their best without some type of garden edging. Garden edging can be made from several different kinds of materials and can be as simple as gathering rocks from your neighborhood or as complicated as hiring a skilled mason to build a small brick wall around your garden. Whatever direction your garden is taking, chances are once you've laid out the basic design and begun choosing which flowers and other plant life will fill your garden, it'll be time to install garden edging.

Choosing Your Garden Edging
Garden edging is, in essence, the frame you'll create for your garden, and you should take similar considerations to an artist choosing a frame for his or her new painting. In other words, your garden edging is nearly as important to your garden as what you do within it. Hardware supply stores may have miniature fences and artificial rocks, but few of these alternatives can match the look of natural stone or brick. Decorative concrete will mix the beauty of stone with concrete's unequaled durability, but this kind of concrete is also likely to cost as much as exotic stone edging. Plants themselves can also make for a nice garden edging, although the types of plants that work best usually take a few years of growth and cultivation to make a solid border. Whatever garden edging you need, the point is not to shirk this integral step. If you're going to put a significant amount of time and/or money into your garden, you want to give it the best presentation you can.

Garden Paths
Of course, by putting in garden edging you might suddenly create the impression your garden is entirely ?boxed-in.? This may be what you want, but you may also have inadvertently created a less welcoming atmosphere, where you find guests afraid to walk through your garden despite the fact that you've designed and left plenty of space for someone to meander around and appreciate the plants and flowers you've chosen. Garden paths are the perfect remedy for this problem. Garden paths, though, are often a little more complicated than garden edging.

Proper drainage must be ensured to maintain the integrity of your garden path, although most gardeners have already taken care of this issue for the garden itself. Mulch, gravel, stone, and concrete are the most common garden path materials. To avoid the ruthless formation of weeds, though, even mulch and gravel will need some kind of foundation (preferably stone, but landscape matting can also work for a period of time.)

More Ideas for Garden Paths
Something else you might think about is garden trellises or pergolas. This type of lattice work will help define and beatify a garden path. You might even think about path covers that have occasional breaks to allow guests to venture out into your garden at specific points. These structures will also help define your garden and present permanent structures to plan future garden styles.

If you're thinking about installing garden edging or a garden path, one advantage of doing both together is that you can use the general garden edging to edge your path at the same time. This may seem obvious, but if you don't do both simultaneously, you're probably going to be spending a few extra dollars, if you can even find the same edging material and color at all.