Down the garden path

Paths help structure the garden and lead viewers onward. — daphneann/CC

I’m the kind of person who enjoys being led down the primrose path — even though, given the favorite habitat of this moisture-loving plant, I’ll probably get my feet muddy.

When a trail beckons, I can’t help wanting to see where it may lead. It’s a fact that feet do love a path, and equally true that it takes a bit of cleverness to devise one.

Blaze a good trail and all who come after will follow in your footsteps. Muff the layout by creating unnatural angles or inconvenient transits, and your work will be in vain. We’ve all seen formal paths ignored in favor of informal shortcuts that bypass useless curves and duck around obstructions.

In the garden, you don’t always have to stick to the straight and narrow; in fact, nothing helps you choreograph a visitor’s experience more than the network of walks and paths you set in place.

A wide grassy swath, big enough for two, encourages leisurely strolling; a straight shot to a clear destination moves one briskly along; and a meandering trail, disappearing around a bend, suggests mystery and invites investigation. Every landscape can use a few well-defined paths for utility and aesthetics — whimsy, too, if possible.

I take notice of variations on the garden-path theme in places I’ve visited. Brick paths, mossy with age; crazy-quilt walkways of broken stone; rounds of tree trunk set in the earth — each had a distinctly different character and each took you somewhere special. Show me a path and I’ll follow it anywhere.

Like most people, I have a variety of paths to direct travel across and through my property.

There are paths constructed of brick recycled from dismantled chimneys, which now look like they’ve been there as long as the house. There’s nothing fancy about their layout — one goes directly and without fuss to the front door, with a branch that takes you through a gate and down the middle of a walled garden to join the more direct path from the parking area to the back door. I had enough bricks left over to fill the path in my fenced garden, a perfect foil to the foliage.

A simple path of stepping stones in grass. — Kinduro/Creative Commons

One of the smartest things I’ve done is add 2 feet to the width of my perennial beds for hidden, mulch-covered paths at the back edge. These allow me to reach those back-of-the-border plants without tramping through the beds, compacting my soil. Call them utility paths — no one uses them but me when I’m weeding.

I also have good-sized grassy areas that circle around beds surrounding the mature trees on the west side of the property — not paths, per se, but eminently walkable sod. Grass works if the scale is appropriate, and you can keep it out of the beds proper. In my first perennial garden, I thought I could maintain a 2-foot grass walkway curving gently between my plantings. This was a big mistake (it grew relentlessly into the beds), but since ultimately I had to give that spot up to the shed, I chalk it up as a mistake I don’t have to look at anymore.

At another garden I visited, the owners also had broad, grassy paths between densely planted woodland garden beds. But it was the little secondary trails through the beds, paths lined with soft pine needles, that really caught my attention. I instantly wanted one of my own.

Back home, I stood staring at the large bed beneath my Norway spruce where azaleas, spring bulbs, bleeding heart, Siberian irises and various groundcovers grow. I could see that with a little pruning of low-hanging branches, I could have a little trail winding down the center of this bed — the Spanish bluebells growing there even suggested a route.

My yard kid did the grunt work with saw and pole loppers and — voila — a new path was born.

"What’s with the path?" he wanted to know. "You never had one here before."

Well, I do now. And in blazing trails, it’s not so much the path as the possibilities. Like form follows function, planting follows path-making, and I’ve already seen how, by beefing up the bluebells, moving around some daffodils and ordering a few more woodland flowers, I can have a lovely little blossom-lined springtime path out there. I like it.

Now all I need is a truckload of pine needles.