Clean edges ensure gardens look tidy. Flexible plastic landscape edging is among the ways to separate the lawn from the flower bed. Lux pictura/Shutterstock

Gardens begin at their edges. If the edge isn’t neat and well-defined, no matter how nice the plants look, the landscape will look messy.

Even if a garden has a few weeds or spent blossoms that haven’t been cut, a neat edge shows the garden is being tended and camouflages a lot of problems.

All edges aren’t the same. Garden edging can made of almost anything. It also can be made of nothing.

The simplest, least expensive way to give a garden a good edge is to recut the edge heavily where the lawn and the garden meet, removing the grass and weeds that grow there, including their roots. A variety of tools will do the job and do it well. I use a half-moon edger, which has a sharp steel semi-circle with wooden handle. I like handles about 5 feet long, although some edgers have shorter handles. I’ve seen, but not used myself, edgers with serrated edges that will cut roots.

You determine where you want the edge to be. If you’re worried about straying off line, mark it with string. With a curved garden edge, you can just lay the string or a hose on the lawn. I’ve even heard of people marking the edge with flour. Marking the edge before you cut it gives you a chance to look at your plan and be sure it’s what you want.

Now it’s time to cut: You step on the edger standing on the lawn, pull the edger back, and repeat for as long as you want the edge to be. Once you have made the cut, you get on your knees and, using a hand trowel or garden knife, remove the grass you’ve cut away. The garden edge should now be neat, uncluttered and attractive.

This method isn’t problem-free, though. As anybody who has ever mowed a lawn knows, grass grows, so within just a few weeks, the neat edge that you created may be uneven and messy again.

For a more lasting edge, there are several options. My wife and I use bricks in our garden. Plastic edging is another tried-and-true option. The plastic is flexible and should go about three or four inches deep to keep the roots out of your garden. It’s not difficult to install: Use the garden edger to create a trench between your garden and your lawn, place the plastic along the edge and backfill. But be aware that frost can push up the plastic, where it can be damaged by lawn mowers.

Metal edging is more expensive but will last longer. With some kinds of steel edging, you simply set it up where you want it and pound it in until it is level with the garden.

Nature provides another option: Edge with the stones you dig up in your own garden. The drawback here is that that their uneven shape makes it difficult to cut the grass near the stones. Some gardeners recommended landscape timbers. Personally, I don’t like the way they look. In my opinion, large tree branches would be more natural if you or an arborist have done any pruning on your property recently.

Whatever you use for edging, when you’re mowing the lawn, I recommend that you either use a bag on your mower or train yourself to aim your grass clippings toward your lawn, not your garden. Because our brick edging lays flat between the lawn and our gardens, I can run the mower wheels along the bricks, aiming the clippings back onto the lawn without having to do any hand trimming.

Tom Atwell is a freelance writer gardening in Cape Elizabeth. He can be contacted at: tomatwell@me.com.