Making Your Way Down The Garden Path

What’s the true function of a garden path?

Is it primarily utilitarian, providing a surface for wheelbarrows, carts and lawn mowers to get from one place to another? Is it just for visitors to amble along, inspecting the flower beds and shrubbery?

That was the question posed to participants in this year’s Northwest Flower and Garden Show in Seattle, and answers came in the form of imaginative indoor garden designs as well as symposium programs by internationally known garden authorities.

As San Francisco landscape architect Topher Delaney says, a pathway can determine how quickly people pass through a garden. A clever designer can regulate a visitor’s pace with subtle, sometimes unnoticed design techniques.

For instance, a wide, hard-surfaced path of decomposed granite or concrete will encourage visitors to speed up and walk two or more abreast.

The materials the pathway utilizes also help determine the speed with which visitors view the garden and can appeal to other senses as well. The sound of crunchy gravel underfoot adds to the garden experience as much as muffled footfalls on paths covered with wood chips. And both surfaces encourage a slowed pace, with shortened strides and more attention paid to plants along the pathway.

In one of her designs, Delaney made pavers just an inch smaller than the one before. Hardly noticeable, “but the mind senses there is some difference and you slow down.”

English garden authority Penelope Hobhouse points out that whatever is used on the garden paths should reflect other areas of hardscape: “Paths often look best when built in the same material as the paved terraces which surround the house and, by continuity, act as links between separate garden areas uniting the whole design.”

English gardener and author Rosemary Verey, who assisted Britain’s Prince Charles in designing his garden estate at Highgrove and maintains her own world-reknowned garden at Barnsley House, laid down some simple rules for pathways: “If the garden is long and narrow, a straight path down the middle is too obvious. The length can be broken by hedges or trellises, with cross-vistas between them.”

And the pathways in her potager (vegetable garden) at Barnsley House are both fanciful and practical, allowing a flow of visitors and wheeled garden equipment on wide decomposed gravel paths, while using stepping stones through the center of planting beds shared by vegetables, herbs and flowers.

“This gives informality within a formal design,” Verey says. “Each path has a living edge to prevent soil from straying and to add definition.”