Garden Walkway Paving Designs
There is much beauty attained in a formal garden with the creation of a garden walkway formed with tile, brick pavers or paving stone. There are a variety of paving designs, especially for stone or brick garden walkways; and also for garden paths designed with a combination of brick and stone together. Landscape design software downloads, that are offered as a free trial of the program, are very efficient in planning the formal layout of a brick or stone path. A 3D landscape software package will help you plan your walkway with bordering plants and shrubs, each paving design in three dimensions. For an informal garden or small backyard landscape set away from buildings and the house, much more latitude can be allowed in the placement of paving. Here a perfectly plain walkway of random paving stone can be made.
Flagstone or stone pavers are generally the most preferable material, as it harmonizes more readily than any other, both in color and texture, with the foliage of the garden. Stone paving is suitable for the small backyard garden with a random pattern walkway. Great care must be taken not to make a garden paving walkway with single large paving stones set far apart, like stepping stones across a brook. The spaces between are difficult to cope with. If grass is used between them, it cannot be cut with a mower and must be snipped with clippers or left in untidy fringes. If perennial plants are used, they grow to a certain height and the whole course of the path becomes an obstacle course. Of course small children love this sort of garden walkway and jump along it, but they generally manage to land on a plant. With landscape software, be sure to utilize the measuring tool to correctly align the stone path.
DIY Stone Paving Design
 |
 |
When stone pavers are obtainable in a standard size, it may be laid in such a fashion at this. The joints should be made tight to strengthen the pattern. |
Here stone and brick are used to get an interesting and elaborate surface texture. The bricks are laid in herringbone and in ordinary bond. |
 |
 |
Bricks laid flat and on edge are combined with tiles to get a pattern resembling a woven mat.
|
A random arrangement of field stones can be enclosed and given formality by rectangular flags. |
Best Paving Stone
It is best that garden walkway paving designs allow one to walk with ease and comfort and at least two abreast. There are, of course, many paving ideas of brick and stone but the simpler ones almost invariably look best. In the more out-of-the-way and wilder parts of the cottage garden and the parts that are given to green leafy herbaceous plants, nothing is better for herbaceous borders than wide plain grass paths. By wide, we mean 8' or 10' at least. Nevertheless, although grass paths are most beautiful, they are not good if narrow and they are no good as a right of way with foot traffic. They wear out at once and must only be used for the garden and not as a regular walkway from one place to another. A paving stone path does away with the necessity for trimming along the edges of the herbaceous beds and provides a dry approach to all the perennials after showers and on dewy mornings.
Kitchen Garden Walkways
For kitchen garden walkway paving designs, a pattern of 3 feet wide and on each side of the garden, with flat grass edges 2 feet wide, proves quite accommodating. One can wheel anything on paving stone paths, and walk on them in wet weather, and they are very effective and always greatly admired. Of course, the drawback is that the grass has to be cut at least once a week and also edged with clippers and there are four edges to each path. Gravel can always be used with good effect in kitchen gardens and the outside walkways of any part of the garden and makes very good winding paths through trees. For the more sequestered parts of the garden, plain brick paths are very effective, but these must be made with an edge of bricks, and in some parts they suffer somewhat with the frost as they are almost always wet when it freezes and it splits them.
Cinders, too, make excellent garden paths in the rougher parts of the kitchen garden and under trees. They are beautiful for walkways, if well-made and kept, and last for years. The dark blue gray is most effective in some places, especially with white flowers as an edging. Little narrow brick and paver paths in the herbaceous borders, about 3 from the back, provide a charming effect. These garden walkways do not show after early spring, when they look rather nice and they enable one to get at the border in all parts without treading in the soil, where the flowers are growing. Choosing garden walkway paving designs and materials is really largely a matter of common sense. If you have in your garden a little secret place where you can sit on quiet nights in peace under the moon, carpet that place with something soft like noiseless mossy grass, and see that there is no resounding paving within earshot. Author: C. H. Bedford.