• Pavers edge flower beds along a path in the yard.garden image by fumie from Fotolia.com
  
  Flower or vegetable beds are decorative even as they are useful. Landscaping with garden beds can provide early and late blooms when raised beds protect plants from chilly weather. Garden beds showcase features of your property, complement the design of a formal yard or surround a feature of the larger garden with an extra burst of color.
  
  

Formal Gardens

• Flowerbeds surrounded by rigorously trimmed hedges evoke the public gardens of Paris or the monocolor garden beds of a great estate. This landscaping style is perfect for a home with a large front lawn or one set back from the road by a gated drive. Determine the best outline hedges or shrubs for the design. It can be as simple as a low curb of green foliage barely containing exuberant daisies and daylilies--backed up by tall green privacy hedges--or as complex as a maze with patches of flowers filling the outline. It could be a design--like figure eights or chevrons--that holds sections of flowers of one color or type. A bed of mixed red and yellow tulips is stunning in spring; swirls of marigolds, cosmos and zinnias are cheerful later in the season.
  
  

Raised Beds

• Raised flower or vegetable beds can create a room, a welcoming spot to sit or serve as the botanical portals to your yard. Along a path in the backyard garden, set a stone or weathered teak bench and surround it on three sides with raised flowerbeds that have butterfly- and hummingbird-friendly flowers, vines and bushes. Add a birdbath or a small fountain to make the bench even more of a "destination." Frame an intersection with flowerbeds flanking two paths and a round or octagonal raised bed in the center of the intersection. The beds will keep traffic moving on the paths you want visitors to use and provide something beautiful to contemplate at every turn. For a patio near the kitchen, use raised beds to grow herbs and vegetables. The fragrant herbs can start earlier in the spring in the protection of a raised bed and continue growing safely well into fall.
  
  

Edging

• Define the borders of your garden beds for better control and visual appeal. Set a wide ribbon of gravel at the edge of a flower or vegetable bed. White gravel is pretty and shows the bright colors of the annuals in a cottage garden bed. Tiny white alyssum is dense enough to create a visible boundary between the rest of the flowers and the lawn. Casually piled flagstone or small boulders keep the perimeter clear, but both look wonderful when groundcover grows partly over them. Diagonal brick is always terrific--use mismatched old bricks to keep this from being too severe, and be sure all the bricks lean in the same direction, even when there is more than one bed. Use flat brick so you can mow the lawn without having to edge around the flowerbeds. Be sure the bricks are flush with the lawn or slightly below it.