Whether you want to add color to your garden or soften the appearance of a driveway or sidewalk, border flowers are a beautiful way to improve the appearance of your landscape. Adding edging to your landscape creates a crisp, finished look and serves a more functional purpose: traditional landscape edging materials, such as brick, stone, or steel, prevent plants from overtaking your lawn while keeping the grass out of your beds. But as slightly overgrown looks, like the cottage garden style, have gained widespread acceptance, you may think this streamlined aesthetic is too harsh for a garden.
Enter edging plants for landscaping borders. Position these alongside edging materials to soften the look, or use lower-growing plants on their own to outline different areas of your garden. As the frontline of your flowerbeds, edging plants should look good no matter the season or the growing conditions, unfurling new flowers and foliage from spring to fall. Bonus points go to colorful border plants that also enhance the winter landscape.
How To Use Edging Plants
The best edging plants for your landscape catch your eye and lead it forward—for example, calling attention to a garden path to help direct foot traffic. Placing colorful edging plants around a flower bed also adds visual excitement while clearly defining the planting space from other nearby features. Consider a uniform look to maintain a more orderly aesthetic: Using just one type of edging plant—for example, one of many evergreen edging plants, like blue star juniper or creeping juniper—provides a consistent frame for the seasonally changing inner parts of the garden.
A green lawn and a living fence with a pretty pink blooming edge are a lovely combo for a garden, they look chic together.
Bell-flowers paired with white tulips look fresh and cool and make the hedge in the backdrop look lively and cool.
A creative outdoor decor feature with white gravel, green topiaries, bold blooms and dark foliage as a border to add curb appeal.
A green lawn ia refreshed and spruce up with a bold blooming edge, it's not a flower bed but a more casual alternative.
Yellow and purple blooms lining up the path are a cool way to make an edge and spruce up the green lawn making it non-boring.
Use colorful blooms of various kinds to make the edge cooler and brighter and mix them up with larger blooms and plants for a bolder look.
Pink, coral and orange flowers will break the monotonous greenery of the hedge and lawn and add an eye-catchy touch.
A dark green living fence, colorful mums and little white Laurentia fluviatilis groundcovers make up a sophisticated and chic space.
Colorful tulips line up the pathway to the house and add color to the front yard the best way possible.
Euonymus is a bright groundcover plant that can be effectively and boldly used for garden edging.
Blue and pink will always be an eye-pleasing combo, and here forget-me-nots and pink tulips create a beautiful border.
If you love blue shades, creating forget-me-not edges for your shady garden will be an ultimate idea.
Bold yellow and green hedges with an eye-catchy shape and pink fuchsia bloom borders are a gorgeous combo for the outdoor space.
Evaluate Your Light Level
Before you pick your edging plants, assess the amount of sunlight your space gets. Full-sun plants will perform best if the sun shines directly for eight or more hours a day. But if the bed is shaded enough to get less than eight hours of direct sunlight a day, choose plants that prefer growing in part shade. Refer to our lists below to find the best picks for your landscape.
Large green and purple succulents form a creative garden edge, these aren't blooms or groundcovers and they will personalize the space a lot.
A green hedge paired with bold purple and fuchsia blooms that bring color and interest to the space and make it bold and vivacious.
Hosta is a bold plant that has various species, and here you can see one of them lining up the path.
Hosta edging will add interest and texture to the green lawn making dark foliage and green topiaries stand out.
A refined English garden is done with green topiaries, lavender and foliage edges for a less formal and more eye-catchy look.
A modern garden bed done with green and red topiaries, lamps and lavender as an edge plant.
Lavender is perhaps the best edging plant ever as it pleases with its color, look, texture and a wonderful aroma, besides, it's butterfly-attracting.
Liriope and Mondo grass are a lovely modern combo to line up a walkway or make an edge for the garden bed.
Liriope is an alternative to lavender, with no less beautiful blooms but lower stems.
Liriope looks nice with a green lawn as it enlivens it with blooms and creates a perfect edge.
Bold Marigold edging paired with a green lawn is a more modern landscape than traditional flowers beds with blooms.
Bright Muscari edging will add color and interest to any flower bed, fence or path and will make it gorgeous.
Line up the paths with pink and white blooms like here and create matching arrangements using the same flowers but in pots.
A flower bed with yellow blooms shows off an edge of pink flowers and they create a bold and lovely combo.
Make Sure To Consider Mature Size
Underestimating the mature size of a new landscaping addition is a frequent mistake when selecting all types of plants, but it’s especially problematic when it comes to edging plants. Take lavender: In a 4-inch nursery pot at the garden center, it’s hard to imagine lavender could expand to 24 inches wide in a couple of years. Take a look at various edging plants below!
These bright pink flowers enliven the stone fence and make the landscape brighter and cooler at the same time.
Pink Phlox is a perfect plant for creating edges and to use it as a groundcover, too, it looks delicate, romantic and cute.
Bold red and pink and some white blooms will turn a simple stone path into a fab garden feature with lovely styling.
Bright red blooms lining up the walkway to the entrance will make the front yard bolder, cooler and brighter.
Two different types of Hosta plant lining up the fence and the pathway at the same time make the front yard more stylish and modern.
If you have a lot of greenery in the front yard, topiaries, fences and lawn, refresh the space with a bit of blooming edging, and you will get a cohesive and modern space.
This front yard is pure elegance with its tall living fence, some hedges, stone walkways and white blooming edging.
A flower bed with hydrangeas is framed with a hedge and some white flowers for a cuter and fresher look.
A creatively arranged curving flower bed features various plants and foliage, some pink blooms and white flowers for the edge and some trees.
A sophisticated garden with hedges, a living fence, some topiaries, white hydrangeas and white bloming edging for flawless style.
A beautiful garden with a green lawn, bold fuchsia blooms, grasses and some Laurentia fluviatilis groundcovers for the edge.
Infuse your garden with color rocking not only tall and bright blooms but also adding a bold flourishing edge of yellow and fuchsia flowers like here.