25 Raised Garden Bed Ideas

Discover different types of raised garden bed styles and flower bed styles that will inspire you to create your own orderly garden space.

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March 04, 2022

By: Julie Martens Forney, Felicia Feaster, and Lynn Coulter

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Try These Raised Garden Bed Ideas

Raised garden beds offer several practical benefits, including the ability to more easily control soil composition and easier access to your plants. But raised beds can be as stylish as they are functional. The only real rule in gardening with raised beds is to use your imagination to create raised beds that complement your landscape. You can buy raised bed kits ready for easy assembly or build DIY raised beds that cost little money.

The above example of a raised bed potager, or kitchen garden, showcases the orderly, formal design these beds can bring to a setting. Simple wood frames constructed from rot-resistant lumber provide years of growing success. Raised beds lend themselves to intensive gardening techniques, such as interplanting, succession planting and square-foot gardening. Continue to see more raised garden bed ideas.

DIY Project: How to Build a Raised Garden Bed Step-by-Step

Raised Beds in Landscape Design

The beauty of a raised bed is how it can work as a design element in the garden. Garden designer P. Allen Smith incorporated formal raised vegetable beds into the landscape at his Garden Home in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Woven Wicker Gives a Rustic English Garden Appearance

There are a variety of materials that can be used to build a raised garden bed, such as woven wicker, giving a rustic English garden appearance.

Also See: 17 English Garden Ideas

Informal Stone Raised Bed

An informal stone raised bed design features individual boulders stacked and fitted to create a foundation for productive gardens. This mounded garden illustrates a type of raised bed known as hugelkultur (German for “hill culture”). Plants in hugelkultur raised beds reach mature size more quickly than in traditional planting beds and need very little watering.

Summertime Raised Beds

Raised garden beds can be made from chemical-free wood, stones, rocks or composite or recycled materials. They're usually bottomless squares or rectangles that sit on top of soil that's been cleared of weeds, grass, rocks and sticks. Because you can easily amend the soil in them, they offer good drainage and aeration for plant roots. If you're buying a kit, look for such options as attached trellises or built-in irrigation.

Metal Gives a Modern Look

Metal raised beds blend artfully into a modern style landscape. Any metal is long-lasting and carefree, and this product features a steel product known as Zincalume, which lasts four times as long as galvanized steel. This particular design offers the beauty of curved edges that softens the hard look of corrugated metal.

Aim High With Beds

Tall raised beds can make a small yard seem larger by injecting vertical interest. Taller beds take the backache out of ongoing plant maintenance by eliminating the stooping necessary to tend in-ground beds.

Grow Up in Raised Beds

Use the frame of a raised bed as a construction platform to host a trellis, and you can stock your garden with climbing flowers or edibles, like snow peas. The frame of a raised bed provides multiple options for attaching accessory items, like a floating row cover, frost blanket or mesh fencing to deter animals.

Build It: Build a Raised Bed and Trellis

Wall-Hugger Planter

The wall-hugging qualities of this planter make it a good choice for small space gardens, where every square inch needs to work hard. Tuck the wall vegetable trug along a wall or fence for an instant raised garden bed that’s tall enough to eliminate bending when planting or weeding. Plant taller crops toward the flat side of the planter and shorter ones toward the front.

BUY ONLINE:: Williams Sonoma, $259.95

Take a Seat

Red cedar makes a long-lasting contribution to a raised garden bed. This bed features a handy bench just the right height for perching on bed edges and tending plants in the garden. The bench offers a wide lip that hooks over the edge of the bed, providing stable seating. It’s also portable, small enough to pick up and carry to another spot along the raised bed edge.

Box Your Garden

Oversized red cedar boxes allow you to create a custom raised bed garden design. Five boxes of varying sizes come as part of a set. Arrange the planter boxes in a design that makes the best use of your growing area, sunlight or yard shape. Long-lasting cedar is rot-resistant, making an ideal material for raised bed planters.

A Bed of Straw

Use straw bales to create a raised bed that’s fully compostable. Straw beds bring a host of benefits to the landscape. They’re inexpensive and also offer a temporary bed solution. After the garden season ends, straw bales can easily be used as winter mulch or converted into layering material for creating a lasagna garden.

Trolley Garden Bed

Embrace pain-free gardening with a raised bed that’s tall enough to eliminate bending while tending. This elevated trolley garden offers an ample 12 square feet of growing area, including a deep enough pocket to host tall crops like tomatoes. Tuck shorter plants like leaf lettuce and radishes along bed edges.

Raised Bed Watering

Using soaker hoses in raised beds can be tricky. Typically parts of the hose wind up soaking footpaths as they snake throughout beds. A snip-n-drip soaker hose system lets you trim soaker hoses to the correct length for your raised beds. Once hoses are cut, snap fittings into place and turn the water on.

Quadrant Design

A quadrant of raised garden beds keeps fresh vegetables just steps away from the Mediterranean home's kitchen. In the center is a star-shaped bed that is as functional as it is stylish.

From: Casa Smith Designs, LLC

Colorful Raised Bed

When raised beds are made from UV-stable polypropylene, they infuse a landscape with bold color year-round. Plastic beds provide long life and don’t rot like wood can. Just be sure to choose materials that are UV-stable to prevent rapid breakdown by sun exposure. The above design features easy interlocking corners.

Front Yard Raised Bed Garden

With the right design, a raised bed can work even as a design element in a front yard. A wall disguises and organizes this Atlanta-area raised bed garden. A center raised bed is surrounded by built-in, narrow beds perfect for trellising vegetables to make use of vertical space.

An Orderly Kitchen Garden

This tidy, compact raised bed kitchen garden is all you need to add fresh ingredients to your recipes. Your kitchen garden can be as elaborate as a large plot of land sporting many raised beds and trellises or as simple as a few pots on a sunny balcony. As long as you have a spot that gets five to six hours of sun (hopefully near the kitchen, thus the name), well-amended soil or a good potting medium and are committed to the process, your garden will thrive.

A Raised Bed to Keep Animals Out

A 13-1/2" high fence surrounds this 20"-high garden bed, helping deter dogs and rabbits. The front fence panels are hinged, so you can get into the 3'X6' bed to tend or harvest your plants.

Stone Beds Last Forever

Stacked stones provide a long-lasting bed edging that doesn’t rot despite contact with wet soil. The stone absorbs heat and radiates it into soil inside the raised bed, allowing you to plant sooner in spring and let crops grow longer in fall.

Raised Beds with Steps

When you're installing steps to reach a patio, porch or door, consider incorporating raised beds for shrubs and other plants. In this design, by Kane Landscapes, a fountain adds pleasing sounds to the setting.

Raised Herb Beds

Virginia master gardener Diane LaSauce, who writes the popular blog, home, garden, life, grows French tarragon, chives, parsley and other herbs in round, raised beds made of shaped pavers from a home improvement store. She used a sturdy pitchfork to dig 12 inches deep into the center of each rounded bed and amended with new topsoil. Pea gravel, spread over weed-blocking landscape cloth, gave her beds a finished look.

Raised Beds with Cattle Panels

Garden blogger Diane LaSauce also created two raised beds measuring 5'x12' and added cattle panels so vining plants could grow vertically. "Cattle panels are pre-fabricated, galvanized wire panels ... (that) can be shaped into a curve easily to adapt to garden use ... they should last for years, too. Quick, easy and affordable," she says. LaSauce grows heirloom catnip in a smaller bed. Other beds hold fennel and dill, host plants for swallowtail butterflies. Her buckets collect rainwater.

African Keyhole Garden Bed

Keyhole gardening comes from parts of drought-stricken Africa. This keyhole bed has a tunnel in the center, so you can compost kitchen scraps to help provide moisture and nutrients to your plants. The beds are made from a food-grade, BPA-free polymer extrusion. For every 4 beds sold, Vita Gardens builds one of these high-performance keyhole beds in Rwanda.

Retaining Walls as Raised Beds

Raised beds don't have to contain flowers or vegetables. They're also useful for shrubs. The retaining walls used to make raised beds in front of this home help add visual interest and bring the plants into scale. The design, created by Kane Landscapes, also creates a shortcut from the door to the driveway.

Wraparound Raised Bed

This wraparound raised garden bed has it all: a folding, hinged trellis for climbing plants, 33" high fence panels that deter pests and work as additional trellises, and a gate, so you can get to your plants easily. It's sold as a kit with an optional automatic watering system.

25 Raised Garden Bed Ideas

Related To:

Shop This Look

Try These Raised Garden Bed Ideas

Raised Beds in Landscape Design

Woven Wicker Gives a Rustic English Garden Appearance

Informal Stone Raised Bed

Summertime Raised Beds

Metal Gives a Modern Look

Aim High With Beds

Grow Up in Raised Beds

Wall-Hugger Planter

Take a Seat

Box Your Garden

A Bed of Straw

Trolley Garden Bed

Raised Bed Watering

Quadrant Design

Colorful Raised Bed

Front Yard Raised Bed Garden

An Orderly Kitchen Garden

A Raised Bed to Keep Animals Out

Stone Beds Last Forever

Raised Beds with Steps

Raised Herb Beds

Raised Beds with Cattle Panels

African Keyhole Garden Bed

Retaining Walls as Raised Beds

Wraparound Raised Bed

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