ideas for landscaping your home, gardens, home improvement tips, water features & garden decoration

Planning Your Garden

Tile And Other Artificial Edgings

THESE nave a wider application than the living plant edgings just noticed, and they are a necessity in a well-kept garden. When turf and soil or turf and gravel come into juxtaposition the clean-cut edge of the turf constitutes a good enough edging. The case is different where soil and gravel meet. The qualities which should distinguish a good edging are durability (both as regards resistance to weather influence and accidental fracture); flexibility, to permit it to be laid in a good curve if necessary; stability, to enable it to keep in place; and, lastly, moderate cost.

Tile Edgings — These may be just plain roofing tiles, or special edging tiles with a "fancy" margin, of which many patterns, good, bad, and indifferent, are offered for sale. Of the former I have little to say beyond pointing out that they are usually too thin to resist the wear and tear of every-day usage, and the porous kinds are subject to fracture by frost. Special edging tiles are made of the following materials:

Porous brickware (red).
Hard brickware (red).
Stoneware (brown).
Blue brickware (slaty blue).

The first is undesirable on account of its brittleness and liability to fracture by frost, and the last on account of its unpleasant color, though it has the advantage of toughness and strength. Between the other two materials there is little to choose. Both are durable and unobjectionable in color, and the gardener may decide as he thinks best. If price is a consideration, he would find the hard brick-ware the least expensive, though prices may vary according to district.

When it comes to selecting the pattern he cannot be too circumspect, and he had best confine himself to simple designs. In my opinion the tile edging is not a feature it is desirable to emphasize with ecoration. The plain scallop edge is the least offensive. (See Fig. 65.)

Even that is apt to suffer in use, and will show unpleasant gaps where some of the projections have been broken off by a chance blow of the spade.

Perhaps the strongest pattern is the so-called "cable" design, but to that there is the objection that it is a barefaced imitation of something which it never quite succeeds in simulating, and which in the reality would be a most inappropriate thing as a permanent feature in the garden. Moreover, these tiles are unsightly when laid in curves.