30+ Raised Garden Bed Ideas

Both beginning and experienced gardeners love raised garden beds. Here are 30+ cool ideas for raised garden beds, from the practical to the extraordinary.

When it comes to adding beauty to your home there is nothing that compares to that natural beauty that plants and planters bring to your home.  They add texture, interest, and even sometimes colorful blooms to adorn your landscape.  A lawn is great, but by getting creative with shrubs, perennials, annuals, bulbs, trees and ground cover you can have a yard that blooms and adds color to your life most of the year.

But the best way to add all this color and plant life is to contain it somehow so that the mulch or gravel can stay in place and the weeds or grass can not.  So, what you want to do is contain the blooms and today we are showing you over 30 ideas for how to contain them.  Make a cutting flower bed, and garden bed or another beautiful space in your yard.

More gardening ideas: tips for gardening with kids, front yard landscaping ideas, and creative flower bed ideas.

30 Raised Garden Bed Ideas

So the question is, what are some great flower bed ideas?  Both beginning and experienced gardeners love raised garden beds, since they can be filled with good soil free from existing weeds.  The are relatively low maintenance , require minimal or no digging, are easier on your back, keep the mulch contained, and will give you less weeds. Here are 30 cool ideas for raised garden beds, from the practical to the extraordinary.

Wood Raised Garden Beds

Use wood to create a custom garden bed box that fits your space and style with these ideas for inspiration.

Corner Wooden Planter

Build this corner wooden raised garden bed with three separate sections. Its a great location at the edge of a low deck by your back door, for growing herbs. Perfect for a sad corner in your backyard!

Elevated Raised Garden Beds

Get your garden even higher off the ground to prevent rabbits and other animals from stealing your veggies! Build an elevated raised garden bed. Here’s how.

Raised Garden Bed Kits

There are kits that you can purchase that includes all building materials and instructions to make your own raised garden beds. Great for DIYers who want to build but don’t feel like doing all the measuring. This one is really nice; it includes a gate and fencing and even an option for an automatic watering system!  And it creates the cutest little garden path, which is great for including kiddos while gardening!

Divided Raised Garden Beds

Add wood dividers in your beds and plant one herb or plant in each spot. Neat and organized! Perfect for herbs that can be invasive, like mint! (image via artandappetite.com).

Raised Garden Beds on a Sloped Backyard

Do you have a slope in your backyard that you don’t know what to do with? This is the ultimate of flower bed design ideas,  it’s great for both structure and planting. Build (or hire someone to build) raised garden beds on the slope! See some great pictures here and don’t miss the extra information and helpful advice in the comments.

Raised Garden Beds with Casters

If you need to move around your raised garden beds regularly, just add casters to the bottom of your raised beds! Perfect for small patios with concrete or tiled floors.  Pull them around a beautifully dressed outdoor table to create a great setting for an outdoor dinner.

Self-Watering Planter

Put in a perforated drain pipe in your raised garden bed to make it self-watering. That will save water and help your plants grow well. Helpful for when you go off on vacations!

DIY Garden Enclosure

Prevent deer and other animals from gobbling down your produce by building a raised garden bed with an enclosure, complete with a gate door.

U-Shaped Raised Garden Bed

Grow a large garden that you can easily navigate around with this u-shaped raised garden bed. Find instructions how to build your own here.

Cedar Fence Garden Beds

Use cedar fence pickets to build raised garden beds that will set you back only $10 or a little more, depending on your store’s prices. What a smart idea!

Raised Bed Pest Cover

If marigolds don’t keep the pests out, then maybe you can try to cover your beds.  Keep pests out of your garden by building this raised bed pest cover to put over your garden beds!

Raised Wood Pallet Garden Bed

This clever pallet garden bed requires no building – just a good stapler and landscaping fabric!  Just be sure to know the history of the pallet if you chose to grow edible food.  Incase there may be chemical contamination.

Raised Herb Beds From Drawers

Paint a couple of old drawers in a fun design and use them as little raised garden beds! Great for herbs and other small plants.

Metal Raised Garden Beds

There are many easy to create metal beds using galvanized metal or watering roughs. Check these ideas out.

Culvert Garden Bed

Use culvert to create raised garden beds to add an industrial look to your backyard!

Metal Decorative Corner Supports

Add some jazz to your wooden raised garden beds with decorative corner supports! They’ll also help make the construction of your raised garden beds a bit easier and keep them sturdy. These dragonfly-themed corner supports would be fun additions to any garden!

Galvanized Livestock Watering Troughs

Watering troughs will last a long time and has a great industrial look. No DIYing needed except to drill in a few holes in bottom for drainage.  This is also a great solution for a small space.

Wood and Corrugated Steel Raised Garden Beds

Nice combination of wood and corrugated steel, a handsome marriage of nature and industrialization! An economical solution to DIYing your raised garden beds. Here’s another (gorgeous!) example.

Aluminum Can Garden Bed

Drink a lot of soda? Save your cans to make aluminum can raised garden beds! Use cement to keep the cans together and cover it all with stucco for a really nice look. Image via Gardentenders.com

Stones, Bricks, and Other Materials

There are so many cool ideas using stones, bricks, and even kiddie pools for unique garden bed ideas.

Character Shaped Flower garden:

with just some regular stacking garden pavers you can create a beautiful character shaped planter.  Want this same sweet face in your garden get the plans here.

Herb Spiral

Herb spirals make very cool-looking raised garden beds and are great for people with little space for gardening.

Cinder Block Raised Garden Beds

Build a raised garden bed easily and cheaply with cinder blocks. Give it a finished and modern look by adding concrete caps on the tops!

Mosaic Raised Garden Bed

So pretty and economical! Use the art of mosaic (with broken, left-over tile, broken wine glasses, etc) to decorate the tops of your cinder blocks and cement blocks.

Raised Planter Stand with 55-Gallon Drums

This is a great way to build waist-high garden beds and a smart way to use a couple of 55-gallon juice drums if you already have some laying around. You could find these drums on Craig’s List or businesses that use them, just make sure that they are food-safe.

Cement Mixing Trays on Planter Stands

Build a planter stand (check out the previous tutorial listed above) and then put in cement mixing trays to hold the soil and plants.

Paver seating wall:

With some patience you can install a beautiful paver wall that acts and a planter bed AND a seating wall like the one above!  We particularly loved this flowerbed.  This was our mostly perennial flower bed filled with all the hues you can think of.  Which is also really good for the honey bees!

Concrete Raised Garden Bed

Here’s how to DIY a beautiful concrete raised garden bed with a nice curve and a corner. You can adapt the plans to fit your space.

Kiddie Pools as Raised Garden Beds

Kiddie pools might not be the most beautiful raised garden beds, but they might be right for you if you’re looking for a cheap and quick solution that takes only minutes to set up. Or you could use one kiddie pool for your kids’ own garden!

Keyhole Gardens

Keyhole gardens, which are widespread in Africa, include an active compost pile in the middle of a raised garden bed. This method holds moisture and nutrients in the gardening soil and helps you use less water. Perfect for hot and dry climates but they would work anywhere!

Stone Raised Garden Bed

Stone raised garden beds are beautiful and will blend well with your home if you have a stone path or a stone exterior. They are more long-lasting than wood, albeit more expensive, but you can save on costs if you build one yourself.  I really love this planting in particular, with the taller plants in the center, the shade loving plants around the back edge of the planter under some tree branches, and the stone garden path that wraps around it.

Dry-Stacked Flagstone Garden Bed

This tutorial uses no mortar – just heavy flagstone stacked on top of each other. Gorgeous.
Image via paintspeckledwithpawprints.com.

Brick Raised Garden Bed

Traditional and permanent! Especially perfect for you if you have a pile of bricks waiting to be used. Here’s how to build a brick raised garden bed.

Small Containers Grouping

If your space is small, or you don’t have free ground don’t forget that you can corral several flower pots together in one space and create a container garden like this above.  Photo by Nothing Ahead from Pexels

JOSEPH WANEK

Old Tires as Garden Beds

You can easily find old tires from car shops for free. Save them from the landfill and use them to create raised garden beds.  Painting them fun colors also ads a lot of visual interest.  This would be perfect for kiddos trying out gardening for the first time.

Hopefully, these raised garden bed ideas have inspired you to build or buy your own! It’s a wonderful feeling to serve food to your family that you’ve grown in your own backyard.

So tell us, are you a gardener in it for the tomatoes and never ending zucchini?  Or do you love the green foliage, the daffodils, tulips, sunflowers and all the pinks, yellows, oranges, purples and so many butterflies, more that your heart’s desire!  Tell us in the comments we’d love to hear what you love!

More gardening ideas and inspiration:

• Build a Monogram Planter
• Build a Raised Square Foot Garden Bed
• Container Gardening Tips
• Mickey Mouse Planter Bed
• DIY Vegetable Garden Ideas
• All of our Gardening Ideas and Projects

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Originally posted 07.09.2015 // Updated 4.28.2021 // 3.15.22

I’m Elisa and I live in Austin, Texas with my husband and our two little girls. I used to teach reading and writing, but now I stay at home with my two kiddos and read and write in my spare time. I also love to undertake DIY projects, find new recipes on Pinterest, and dream about someday finally completing our home. Above all, I love to learn about new things and sharing my new-found knowledge with others.”