Beginner Gardening: Welcome to the Beginner Landscaping forum!, 1 by Melissande

Melissande wrote:
This is such a long and rambling thread I just cut to bottom, so don't know if this has been addressed, but somewhere in there someone asked about paths. Paths are easy, really.

Just go about your daily business for a few months and let your grass get a bit long and you'll see right away where your paths should go. The grass gets flattened, and grows more slowly from walking on it and your paths will be plain. Follow them for your first, basic, utilitarian paths, then let your creativity lead you from there.

Something that's fun to contemplate is the creation of 'rooms' or discrete areas of garden within your yard. Instead of trying to design a conprehensive design for the whole place, use structures (like arches and arbors and vines, benches, birdbaths, focal points like vases, statues, sundials, shepherd crooks with various things on them, wind chimes, hummer feeders, bird feeders and houses, flowers,etc.,) use these things to create 'rooms' with walls, paths into and through these, make walls with shrubs, create smaller sections with themes, perhaps one could be a bird or hummer or butterfly garden, another, a shade garden, based on the fact you might have a shady corner created by some buildings or trees, or some other anomaly in the yard. Get out paper and pen and play with the idea.

In the UK, Biddulph Grange is a great giant version, really the granddaddy of this kind of gardening. *Totally* worth studying:

http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-vh/w-visits/w-findapl...

It's actually easier to garden in little sections like this, I've always thought. This isn't 'plop the fountain, flamingoes and garden gnomes right in front of the house so the neighbors can all see them' gardening. This is 'Secret Garden' gardening. Wonderful private spaces you create for *you* that others can't easily see unless you invite them to explore your creation.

Here's a pic of my 'secret garden' in the midst of some upgrades. Normally the porch swing is under the arbor in the background. You enter through the arch which has yellow trumpet vine, honeysuckle, and Don Juan rose growing on it. Like most gardens it's a work in progress.

Melis

This message was edited Aug 4, 2008 2:57 AM