Creating Border Gardens

Creating Border Gardens

Creating a border garden is a wonderful way to improve the overall look of your yard in general, and create dividing lines between specific areas or sections. If for instance, you want to divide your front yard space from the back yard, you could put a border garden in that will look pretty and define the space, without taking up a lot of room or completely blocking the view.

Border gardens look particularly nice when placed around the outside edge of a lawn or yard area though. These small garden beds will define the border of your property, make it look much more appealing, and are usually less expensive than installing a full fledged fence. Plus the border gardens usually accent the yard instead of blocking it from view inside or out.

A border garden is often made just like other types of garden beds are, but they’re designed to sit low on the ground, and they usually have small or dainty plants in them because they’re used more for accent and appeal instead of creating barriers.

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Garden Tip...

All individuals of the vegetable world are so created as to reproduce themselves from seed or its equivalent. Every plant that grows seems to possess the power to perpetuate its kind. All kinds of flowering plants can be grown from the seed, providing good, sound seeds are obtained, and they are placed under the proper influences to make them germinate and grow.
~ James Sheehan
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Almost any kind of garden bed border material can be used too. If you have a brick house for instance, you could use matching bricks to line your border garden. Alternatively, you could by small river rocks or stones, which are larger than pebbles but not as big as boulders are, and use those for the garden bed border.

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Garden Tip...

Three things are absolutely essential in the sowing of seeds, in order to have that success which we all desire to attain:

First; care should be taken to obtain fresh, pure seeds, without which all our after work with them will be in vain.

Second; the soil in which to sow them should be a fine, mellow loam, free from stones and other coarse materials.

Thirdly; sowing the seed. The general custom is to sow in drills. The depth at which seeds should be sown must of course be regulated according to their fineness, or coarseness.
~ James Sheehan
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There are also plenty of decorative, inexpensive pre-molded borders you can buy too, and these are usually sold in any garden center, nursery, or discount department store. Some are designed to look like small picket fences, and others look like a low rock wall. There are some which look like small wooden peirs or railroad ties too though, so the design ideas are almost limitless when you’re planning your border garden.

To plan your border garden though, you’ll need to take some initial measurements of the space your garden will go around. If for example, you’re putting a border garden around the outside boundaries of your front lawn, then you would need to measure the length of each side of the yard which will have the border garden installed.

Since border gardens tend to be built low to the ground, you normally just need to buy enough materials for each side of your garden one layer deep. If you’re using bricks for instance, you’d lay the bricks end to end when creating your garden border, but you wouldn’t need enough bricks to put a second row on top of the first unless you wanted the garden border to be a little higher.

In most cases, once you’ve purchased your border materials, all you need to do is lay them out into their designated spaces. Using our bricks example, you’d place the bricks end to end laying on their sides, at the farthest outside perimeter of your yard. Create a line of bricks all the way down one edge, then turn the corner when you get to it and butt the first brick for the next side up against the last brick from the side you just finished.

Once you have the entire outside area laid, then you simply start laying an identical line of bricks approximately one to two feet from the last line you created. This line will be inside your yard perimeter, and will make up the front of your border garden bed. Your border material will sink into the soil slightly and become more stable over time, but you can help it along by soaking the areas you’re placing them, and pushing down firmly as you lay the material around your yard.

Once the border is completed, all you have to do is put in some plants and flowers. You can simply dig small holes in the existing grass area within your new border, or you can spread a thin layer of new topsoil to plant in instead. Be sure to space your plants appropriately so they won’t crowd each other out as they mature.

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