Take scenic route down the garden path

Garden paths lead you on a journey: Step on a path, and you're on your way. If you are rethinking the elements of your garden or designing a new one, paths are a great place to start.

A beautiful garden isn't just a landscape to be observed from a distance. To experience it properly, you have to stroll under the trees, brush past the fragrant herbs and smell the roses. From the house or from the street, paths beckon you into a garden and establish much of the tone of the experience, says Gordon Hayward, a garden designer and author in Vermont.

Paths can be reassuring or mysterious, but they should always be thoughtfully laid out.

"The whole idea is that when you make a garden, you are making places for people," he says, "and the paths are what link them."
All paths are not equal, Hayward says. In the hierarchy of paths, the front walk is the most important, and it should be wide and welcoming, with room for two people to walk side by side.

"It should broaden right by the door, so there is room for a chair, a bench, a pot or a piece of sculpture," he says. "It's all part of that welcome."

If your front walk is a little narrow, you don't have to rip it out to achieve a better effect. You can make a standard concrete walk wider just by adding a couple of courses of bricks on either side, or by laying cut stone to make an attractive edge, Hayward says.

Other paths ¿¿ leading through a side yard, to the vegetable garden, through a little woodsy copse or from the kitchen door to the compost heap ¿¿ usually do not have to be as wide. The materials certainly need not match the front walk, although Hayward says in his garden he repeats the use of materials to create coherence. His garden has paths of fieldstones, brick, grass and pea gravel.

Hayward recommends using indigenous materials for paths. Cut stones have a tailored look suitable for a formal entrance. The irregular shapes of large fieldstones, laid more randomly, are fitting for secondary paths.

In Hayward's herb garden, a rather informal space, the paths are of pea gravel. Each area flows gracefully into the next, but the character of the paths changes decisively, and to good effect.

"The change announces your arrival into a new space," Hayward says. "You sense intuitively that you have made a transition."

Paths help define a garden; they establish its rhythm. Hayward's gravel paths slow visitors down a little to enjoy the peaceful herb garden.

Tony Avent, owner of Plant Delights, a mail-order nursery in North Carolina, relates how he changed the mood of his garden by landscaping along his front walk. The path had been nothing more than a runway to his house.

After he created berms and beds on both sides, he claims that the walk from his car to his front door started taking him half an hour as he inspected each new plant along the way, studied the effect of the combinations and enjoyed the flowers.

Bill Ruppert, a wholesale nurseryman in the St. Louis area, took out an existing laser-straight front walk and replaced it with a wide walkway of sweeping curves, densely planted on both sides.

Flowerpots at the edges of flower beds, right by the path, invite visitors to pause for a closer look at his flowers, and pots up on the front steps and porch echo the colors and textures of the garden.

A side path of stepping stones, set with plenty of space between them, is planted with tough groundcovers chosen for their ability to tolerate foot traffic.

Mown paths are catching on, too, Hayward says. They are easy and romantic and save time and energy.

"For people who have a huge amount of lawn, I am encouraging them to mow paths, and just let the rest grow up," he says. "It gives a wilder feeling, and birds and butterflies love it."

When you mow a path through the grass, it also makes the taller grass look like you intended it to be that way, and not just neglected.

Paths of all kinds are irresistible invitations to explore, Hayward says. Children, in particular, are drawn to them. They skip along brick paths, hop-scotch their way over stepping-stones, and take a certain gleeful delight in the crunch of gravel underfoot.

Without realizing it, adults do the same things, he says. You may not actually skip, but when you follow a path into a garden, you're leaving your busy life behind.

"A path should be an experience," Hayward says. "It's about walking through a garden, not past it."