Establishing A Garden Path
A garden path defines the design, yet also impacts the way you feel about your garden. In this newsletter, let's explore the options.
“It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work
and when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.”
― Wendell Berry
The Art of Growing Food newsletter is published weekly with artful design ideas for kitchen gardeners. If you’d like to know more about my books and lectures, visit: www.ellenogden.com or follow me on Instagram.
Hello Everyone.
Of the four seasons, spring is certainly the busiest, and life can get a little chaotic. The wheelbarrow is in constant motion, hauling new plants and bags of potting soil, it’s an endless parade of foot traffic between the garden shed and the faucet. Paths are essential for moving everything and everyone in and out of the garden.
Yet how often do you stop to notice the path? I’m way too focused on getting seeds and plants into the ground and making sure the hose is connected. But recently, I stopped for a moment to sit. What did I see? All the weeds creeping in between the stones in the path.
I stopped everything, dropped to my knees and started weeding. A few hours later, I still had not completely removed all the weeds. Yet it did make me think about how to make a better path, or at least one that might not require so much effort.
It’s tempting to ignore the paths in a design by simply leaving enough space in between to move around and in between the beds. Good paths play a long-term role in the garden, for both function and beauty, as well as keeping the maintenance low. When designing paths on paper, they can be straight or curved, but in reality, they don’t always fit the space perfectly as a functional element until the garden is in use.
When I first started to learn about garden design, paths were called the bones of the garden. They define the shape of the garden all year round. Yet paths also give your garden visual interest with texture and color, and choosing the best material for lining paths can make a difference in your comfort and the way the garden functions, visually as a whole, and how much effort it requires.
Path Material:
Choosing the best path material is far more complicated than you might think. It requires thought and attention to how you plan to use the garden long-term. The ideal path material keeps the weeds at bay, yet weeds have a way of always winning. It’s okay to allow a few weeds to manifest, yet a single weed can produce 10,000 seeds which would soon overrun any attempt to cultivate a garden.
If it is a quick garden, you could be satisfied with bark mulch which is easy to find, simple to install, and keeps weeds suppressed, at least for a short time. For a new garden, hay and grass gives the garden a more natural and organic feel and are far kinder on bare feet than on a pebble path.
Once the garden becomes a permanent element of the landscape, hiring a mason to install flat stone or brick is better at preventing weeds. Yet if you change your mind about the garden placement or design, it becomes a chore to remove.
What to choose for path material can evolve. I started with bark mulch and then graduated to river stone, which elevated the way I actually feel about my garden. I like it better, the colors of the plants look more alive as they resonate with the blue-gray of the stone. Changing the path material gave it a fresh look, much like painting the kitchen with a new color.
Upgrading path material can refresh your connection to the garden, and make it a space you want to spend more time. Maybe not on your knees weeding, yet noticing the plants from a new perspective.
Proper Width
One of the biggest mistakes gardeners often make is not making the paths wide enough. The main paths used for walking are ideal at 4 feet wide, or enough to walk two by two and run a wheelbarrow easily down the middle. Auxillary paths, those used for planting and harvesting can be 1 or 2 feet wide.
On paper, it can look like a lot of space, yet in the garden, you will be pleased to have extra room for the plants to sprawl. Gardens don’t always like to be contained, and when the paths create the structure, the plants are allowed to run into the paths freely and turn the garden into a bit of an adventure.
Love Your Path
In many ways, a garden path can be a metaphor for life: consider all the options before you simply go with the easiest solution. What does your path say about you as a gardener? Are you able to make a change in the path material you have to be more reflective of your aesthetic.
A new garden client recently wrote about a pea stone path, in a garden that came with a new house. He didn’t like the color or the texture, and we discussed what other options were available. I’ve always considered pea stone to be a luxury item for those seeking an ideal path material: it is a neutral color, keeps the weeds down, cleans mud from shoes, and there is a satisfying crunch underfoot when walking through the garden. I questioned his decision to hire a backhoe to dig it out.
But alas, what one gardener likes, another does not, which is what I like so much about gardening: we all start with the same three materials seeds, plants, and soil. Yet each of our gardens is uniquely our own design.
From my garden to yours,
Ellen Ecker Ogden
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