Some are looking to provide more convenient passageway from Point A to Point B. Others may want easier access to plantings. Some gardeners may be looking for interesting and attractive ways to delineate different parts of their gardens.

In my case, my husband and I had several reasons to gradually develop the labyrinth of walkways that crisscross our front yard and encircle our back yard.

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We started out with a basic suburban lot adorned with rectangles of homeowners-association-mandated sod, a small garden bed, and a few trees (we got extra trees because we’re on a corner lot – woohoo!).

Such a mundane gardenscape was nothing we’d ever be satisfied with, in the long term. But we’re not the types to sit down and design a landscape. Nor did we want to have to submit plans and pay the $75 fee to the HOA for a “pallette change.”

So, our system of walkways just evolved over the years, largely due to these factors:

Our 60+-pound dogs – being the intelligent beasts they are and wanting to get from A to B efficiently – wore their own paths through the grass, down to the dirt. Watering vast expanses of St. Augustine in Austin in summer is likely to result in bankruptcy. As our gorgeous Monterrey oaks matured, the grass underneath them got little sun and struggled to survive. We removed the railing from our house-wide front porch and wanted to create egress and ingress from the porch out into the yard and vice versa. The less lawn to mow, the better, right? Have you ever mowed grass in 100°F

plants gardening watering lawn trees mulching garden Gretchen Heber