Landscape edging

Landscape edging is the line that separates a bed from the lawn, or a path from the planting. It can be a physical product such as steel, stone, brick, or poured concrete, or simply a clean trench cut with a spade.

Its real job is containment. Without an edge, lawn grass runs into beds and bed mulch washes onto lawn, and the yard slowly loses its definition no matter how well it is planted. A defined edge is most of what separates a maintained yard from a tired one.

Honestly, the cheapest option competes with the priciest. A crisp spade-cut trench, redone a couple of times a year, reads as sharp as installed steel and costs nothing. Manufactured edging mainly buys you not having to recut it.