My yard is pretty awful by most people's standards. Most of it is shady and what grass there is grows in scrubby little patches. That's okay with me. My long-term goal for the yard is for there to be no yard. I want to have the whole thing planted up in flowers, a little vegetable garden (or maybe a big one), bushes, ground cover, whatever it takes to not have frustrating conversations with people I hire to mow my yard.
Like this:
Me: Could you raise the blade on the mower a bit higher so it doesn't cut off the clover blooms?
Yard Guy: Are you serious?
Me: Yes, I am. The bees like clover.
He gave me this look like I was insane and then he never came back again.
So I hired somebody else, and they did better, except...sigh...except for one or two things which I called the owner of the company about.
Me: Hey, you guys are doing a great job on my little yard overall, but last time someone ran over my daylilies and one of my Autumn Joy sedums.
Him: Well, you don't have any edging around your flowerbeds...
Me: I know. And I know that daylilies kinda look like grass, but since they were in the hellstrip I don't see how they got mowed down, and since those sedums have thick pale green leaves and the one y'all ran over was about the size of a basketball and now it's three inches high--
Him: Well, unfortunately, unless you put something around your flowerbeds that's gonna keep happening.
After I kinda calmed down and stopped kicking things, I could see where maybe he has a point.
So I bought me some of those plastic rocks and edged the flowerbeds on either side of my front walkway.
I even got ambitious with a hoe and tore out all the grass and weeds from the right side of the walkway. (I have to do the left side tomorrow.) On the left there, in the foreground, barely visible, is the poor little mowed-down sedum. It was actually larger, pre-mowing, than the one on the right. There's not much in these flowerbeds now: daylilies, Autumn Joy sedum, a lamb's-ear, and some lilies of the valley.
This is what it looks like from across the street at Mr. Carl's house.
I need to work on that bed on the right to make the plastic rocks have a nicer curve to them and get that grass out of there so I can hammer the edging into the ground better. Out in the hellstrip by the street I planted Stella D'Oro daylilies (which got mowed down) and John Creech sedum (stonecrop) because they're really tough. Up by the house I have more daylilies, epimedium, Japanese lilies (which were Esther's), a couple of hostas, and coral bells.
Plastic rocks would not be my first choice for edging my flowerbeds. In this case I needed something quick, easy, and cheap that I could stick in the ground before the yard man came again. I'm planning to expand these flowerbeds over the years until they take up pretty much the whole yard, so the plastic rocks are good for that because I can just yank 'em up, move 'em wherever I want, and hammer 'em back into the ground.