Key takeaways
- Garden edging doesn’t need to be expensive to work. The job is simple: stop grass invading beds, stop mulch spilling onto paths, and give the garden a tidy line. You can spend £3 a metre or £30 a metre and…
Garden edging doesn’t need to be expensive to work. The job is simple: stop grass invading beds, stop mulch spilling onto paths, and give the garden a tidy line. You can spend £3 a metre or £30 a metre and both will do that. The difference shows up in how long it lasts, how much fiddling it needs each spring, and whether it survives a strimmer running along it.
Here’s the honest version of what’s worth paying for and what isn’t.
The cheapest options, and where they fall down
Plastic roll edging is the budget default, usually sold in 9m or 10m rolls for £10-£20. It’s fine for a season or two, especially on a straight run with gentle curves. The problem is UV degradation: cheap polypropylene edging goes brittle within 2-3 summers in full sun and starts cracking where you’ve bent it to shape a curve. It also has a habit of working its way up out of the ground after a few freeze-thaw cycles, so you end up re-hammering the pegs every spring.
Log roll (the short wooden stakes wired together) is the other cheap staple, often £15-£25 for a 1m x 3m section. It looks better than plastic strip but rots at the soil line within 3-5 years unless it’s pressure-treated, and even then ground contact wins eventually. Fine for a cottage-garden look you’re not precious about long-term.
Both are genuinely cheap-as-chips options and both are reasonable choices if you’re renting, if the bed layout might change, or if you just want something in the ground this weekend without a trip to a builders’ merchant.
When cheap edging costs you more later
The real cost of budget edging is labour, not material. A plastic strip that lifts every winter means an hour of re-pegging each March. Log roll that rots means digging it out and starting again. If you’ve got more than about 15-20 metres of bed edge, that recurring labour adds up faster than just buying something that stays put.
Metal edging (steel or aluminium strip, usually sold in 1m or 1.2m lengths) costs more upfront, typically £8-£15 per metre, but it goes in once and holds a clean line for 10+ years. Aluminium won’t rust; steel will eventually at the joints unless it’s galvanised, but that takes a decade or more outdoors. The main failure mode with metal is a strimmer catching the top edge and throwing a wire guard spark, or someone stepping on an exposed corner. Both are avoidable by setting it flush with the soil rather than proud of it.
Edging materials compared
| Material | Typical cost per metre | Lifespan | Main failure mode |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plastic roll strip | £1-£2 | 2-4 years | UV cracking, frost heave |
| Log roll (untreated) | £5-£8 | 3-5 years | Rot at soil line |
| Log roll (pressure-treated) | £7-£10 | 6-10 years | Eventual rot, wire ties rust |
| Steel strip edging | £8-£12 | 8-15 years | Rust at cut edges/joints |
| Aluminium strip edging | £10-£15 | 15+ years | Bending if hit hard |
| Concrete/brick edging | £15-£25 (incl. labour time) | 20+ years | Cracking from frost heave if not bedded properly |
If you’re edging a small border or a rental garden, plastic or log roll is genuinely the right call, not just the cheap one. If you’re edging a permanent bed you’ve just dug and plan to keep, metal pays for itself within a few years of saved re-pegging time.
Installation details that actually matter
Most edging failures aren’t about the material, they’re about installation. A few things that make any edging last longer:
Dig the trench straight-sided, not sloped, so the edging has something to bite into rather than sitting on an angled wall of soil that slumps back. Depth matters more than most people think: 10cm of plastic strip buried is nearly useless against couch grass, which sends roots down 15-20cm easily. For a real grass barrier, you want at least 15cm in the ground, more if you’ve got aggressive spreading grass like couch or bermuda.
Compact the soil on the bed side as you back-fill, not just the lawn side. Loose soil on the bed side is exactly where plastic edging walks itself upward over winter.
For curves, plastic strip is far easier to work with than metal, which wants to kink rather than bend smoothly below about a 1m radius. If your design has tight curves, that alone might decide the material for you regardless of budget.
What you actually need to install it
You don’t need much. A spade for the trench, a rubber mallet for pegs or stakes, and for metal edging a pair of decent gloves because cut edges are sharp enough to open a finger. If you’re doing more than a few metres, a half-moon edging spade makes the trench work genuinely faster than a standard spade, since it cuts a clean vertical line instead of you sawing at it sideways.
For ongoing maintenance once the edging’s in, a basic pair of long-handled edging shears keeps the grass that creeps over the top under control without you kneeling at every bed. And if you went with metal or concrete edging and strimmer sparks are a worry, swap to a plastic line trimmer head near the edges rather than a metal blade attachment.
None of this needs to be expensive. Spend on labour-saving where the edging will stay for a decade, spend nothing extra where it won’t.
