NATURE ABHORS AN EDGE. It wants garden and lawn muddled together. Nature wants to make you look sloppy and lazy. Edges are time-consuming and fussy; they're forever elbowing their boundaries. Like certain people, edges are high-maintenance. I'm no mathematician, but I know that the bigger the flower bed, the longer its edges. Gently undulating borders give you the longest amount of edge per square foot of bed. Perfect circles are the most efficient beds. These details of circumference aren't trivial matters at edging time, especially if you have lots of garden beds. You likely already know about edging tools and aids, including sharp spades, special edging blades, and those black plastic bands that stick up out of the ground like pencil lines you forgot to erase. You've probably tried placing beautiful stones or weathered bricks along the flowerbed edges. Stones and bricks neither keep garden in nor lawn out, so you end up weeding the awkward crevices by hand or string trimmer. Moreover, bricks and stones in perfect rows are frost-heaved into zigzags by spring. I've tried every scheme and, in my last couple of gardens, I surrendered to Mother Nature's persistence by spading and trowelling around every bed twice a season. I don't like string trimmers, so I make my garden mowable up to its edges by leaving a fair amount of clear space. Trimming can be completed with grass shears. The results are beautiful ... for a few weeks. But I'm getting older and smarter. Last summer, I began my fourth new garden in the last 30 years by digging the weeds and preparing the soil near the house in a comfortably large bed - large enough for flowers, shrubs and a couple of trees. Then I tried something new. I removed lawn grasses and other plants about half a metre (18 inches) out from the prepared bed. Inside this edge, I laid a line of strips of old carpeting, wooly side down. The idea is that the carpet is at ground level, and roughly half the carpeting covers the future garden, while the other half covers the lawn. Neighbours gawked at this ugly duckling stage, but I knew my garden would soon turn swannish. The old carpet came from a neighbour whose basement had flooded. We cut the carpet into strips using a utility knife. There are also special cutters that have a crescent-shaped blade. My strips were something less than a metre (three feet) wide; you may want them wider or narrower. Lay the strips, overlapping where they meet, to roughly follow the curves on your border. You may have to cut pieces smaller for great curves, but the garden border doesn't have to exactly bisect the carpet pieces. You'll soon have more graceful curves when you place your chosen edging material over the carpet in your preferred pattern, like the spine of a snake. Once the bricks, blocks or stones are in place, spread soil over all the exposed carpet. To produce an attractive bed, I put enough soil on the garden side of my concrete blocks to almost reach their tops. This gives sufficient depth above the carpet to support small edging ground covers such as creeping phlox, creeping jenny and dianthus. On the lawn side, I put a thin layer of soil, just enough to hide the carpet. The mower straddles the lawn side of the carpet to reveal a perfect edge requiring almost no maintenance. Landscape fabrics can be used in place of carpet, but they're so lightweight they're not as stable under a thin layer of soil, and can catch in the mower blade. When exposed to the sun, they break down fairly quickly. Besides, old carpets seem to be everywhere for the taking, and this edging technique is one way to keep them out of our overflowing landfills. - JENNIFER BENNETT Jennifer Bennett welcomes feedback at jenben@istar.ca or via acreagelife.editors@producer.com.