How to: edging of borders

I have written about this before, and I have no doubt that I will do so again!

There is nothing quite like edging a bed or border, to instantly smarten up a garden.

Here's a perfect example: 

This was taken in October, so you can see that the herbaceous planting is starting to lose its colour, the leaves on the fruit trees are starting to drop, and it generally looks quite a mess: but this is mostly because the lawn has crept into the border.

There is no longer any definition between border and lawn, and the whole thing just looks unsightly.

So I cut a line along where I estimated the edge to be: that's the black line you can see in this picture.

I did this very quickly and simply, using my border spade, whose blade is virtually flat. A normal sized spade won't work, because the blade is curved: if  you don't have a flat-bladed spade, then you would need to use a half-moon edger, which is the "right tool for the job".

When doing this sort of remedial work, sometimes you can clearly see where the edge used to be, sometimes, not so much. 

In this case, as  you can see, not much at all! 

You can make this job easier by stretching a line from one end to the other, in order to get the line straight: I'm fairly good at doing it by eye, and in this case the Client asked that I just neaten it up for now, without getting it perfectly straight: this was because we were planning to move some of the larger plants around in spring, so she didn't want me to enlarge the bed to fit the plants, when some of them might not be there next year.

If you see what I mean.

So, having used my border spade to mark out a roughly straight line, I then weeded out all the grass on the border side, until it looked all spiffy and neat.

There - how much better is that?

I was also able to remove some of the dead foliage from the Peonies, and to clear inbetween the lovely Iris pallida at this end of the border, who were in danger of suffocating under the grass.

Oh, and the bed doesn't actually curve inwards at the far end, that's an artifact with the camera-phone...

... honest!

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