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

Just to give another perspective . . . my husband, the one who mows the lawns in our family, doesn't like this kind of edge because he can't mow up to the edge since the wheels of the lawn mower fall into the ditch, and neither of us wants to weed whack the edge. I like a well done cut edge, but I'm not about to start mowing the lawn, so we reached a compromise. I used commercial grade black plastic edging, tucked down deep enough so that it is hidden behind the grass and lined on the inside edge of the garden bed with a single course of brick. It allows him to run the wheels of the lawn mower on the brick and gives me a bit of a masonry edge to slow down any crawlers trying to get into the garden from the "lawn" like clover or various weeds. It looks tidy, though not perhaps as nice as the trench style, and is a compromise we can both live with. We have not had problems with the edging lifting in three years (but we don't have much clay in our soil.) It does require paving brick, not wall brick which will crumble when it freezes.

I gave my husband the trenching job. We gave up on the black rubber edging. Bricks IÂd like but until I start doing it myself, it wonÂt happen. Our main bed is a big raised one with landscape blocks, I think I burned him out on that one 4 years ago. (We didnÂt install the blocks ourselves but did everything else including move and replant all the perennials.) We have been doing the trenched edge for all the other beds. The one problem I have with that is that it seems to get wider each year. I never seem to be there when heÂs doing it, so I donÂt know if this is what normally happens. It seems like to get a clean cut he has to move back a few inches into the lawn. I find myself with a new bare area around the perimeter of each bed, that then I feel needs filling. Considering IÂd already installed edging plants, IÂd rather not. He does the edges twice a year, in between I go in and pull out any grass or weeds that seed or jump in. I just bought a proper half moon edger, before that he used a small shovel. Will that make a difference? Or is it part of what happens with this system, that the bed gets gradually wider?