This is a pic of the shade bed I am slowly putting together where I need to define between the gravel drive and the bed. Suggestions? Image link:

ColMuldrow, I think you have had a lot of suggestions here for things to do IN the beds and you were looking for things to OUTLINE the beds. No one has really addressed the virtue of your idea of outlining the beds, and I think the message in that is that outlining them may or may not be a good design decision. Could you maybe tell us what is driving your desire to outline them? That would assist in a design discussion... this being a landscape design forum. And in design, purpose often drives decision-making. For me there is some confusion, as I may have suggested in my post, between the image of what you have, and what you want to achieve. What you have is kind of hard to argue with, and because of its dominant nature, trying to put a different kind of landscaping underneath it would have a bit of a futile feel to it. And so, a tidily outlined bed would have a slightly surreal feeling to me in this setting. It is obviously your yard and your preferences will prevail, but given that you've chosen a landscape design forum rather than either a plant forum or a local nursery for advice, I'm afraid that does drive the kind of advice you'll get (unless the conversation turns to ivy...). That said, there are not many plants that will stay exactly where you want them to in the conditions you have here; at least, it may depend on the trees, but I don't think so. Plants travel in response to where they find moisture and light and nutrients. Areas under trees are notoriously short of these attributes, and you may find a carefully planted edge wandering from where you laid it. That is why I suggested a physical edge, which if nothing else would create moisture-retaining areas in the soil that would keep plants inclined to stay where you put them, and allow you to correct if they wander. Yardvaark, I thought we were all going to try to get along. The key to doing that is, I think, in your last remark where you characterize opposing advice as an attack. It is not, and regarding it as such will always lead where this thread has led. Opposing advice, even if it criticizes advice previously given, is just the way the cookie crumbles when you ask a room full of people who are not an organization or hierarchy of any kind for advice. You will not get a single answer, the answers may disagree, and as the asker, you simply have to sort that out and the people in the room have to come to terms with being disagreed with. You could have opposed my advice to use ferns on some basis, and I would not have regarded that as at attack on me, but rather as contextualizing the advice I gave the OP. I might have responded, or reiterated, but probably not if I thought your additional advice enhanced the OP's ability to evaluate the option. I don't regard it as an attack on me when someone denigrates my ingrained aversion to foundation planting; I simply see it as a good thing that the OP gets a variety of advice. If all else fails, we should all be addressing the OP, and not each other. Karin L

Don't limit your ideas just because the bed is small. The beds immediately adjacent to our driveway are quite narrow - in the 18" range on two of the three sides. They get covered in snow removed from the driveway in winter without any problems. Why are you concerned with having things upright? I deliberately plant things that softly mound over the concrete curb at the edge of the bed/driveway to make a nice transition and soften the look. The bed in this picture is very narrow and dry because it is under the overhang of the porch roof. The euonymus gives evergreen winter interest while the rodgersia adds summer flowers and the interesting large leaves. When the rodgersia dies back for the winter the empty space that is left is available storage space for snow removed from the top of the driveway. You can see the bed in the previous picture across the front porch in this picture taken from the road early last August - the main driveway bed is in a lull before late summer bloom starts... In the above picture, the bed on the right side of the driveway looks fairly wide - but it's only 18" wide, with a path behind it! In this picture taken from the roof in June you can see that the bed is narrow and I visually 'widen' it by adding large pots on the driveway. The driveway is the only sunny place in the garden (note the large trees in the backyard that you can see in the second picture...) so I use pots on the driveway to grow fruits and vegetables. The backbone of the border on the right side of the driveway is Pink Beauty potentilla shrubs. They are late to leaf out in spring but then bloom all summer. They make a nice mound that blends well with other plants. Here is one with a lily in early August: and with hardy hibiscuses in August as well: So I don't think you need to feel too constrained just because a bed is narrow.

Would edging really solve the problem of shabbiness? Edging is generally used to control the spread of grass into flower beds. I would think that in your case that the edging would be a waste of money. How about some low lying shrubs or evergreens that you can plant along the edge of the lawn and use a mulch cover below them out to where the lawn is cut to end. While ferns are nice unless they are large species I would think that they really do not present a strong enough silouette to demarck a zone between lawn and woods. got some pics of the woods, of the ferns, of some low shrubs, or low evergreens. You could cut out the images of the shrubs and the evergreens and the ferns and lay them over the area of the picture of the woods and lawn you would want them and see how they compare?