Take time to ponder over paths, says Naomi Slade
It’s worth taking the time and effort deciding where to put them
With the dreaded fake grass stripped away and donated to a local school, and the underlying layer of sand shovelled into old compost sacks (what do you do with 20 sacks of sand anyway?!), I’m now trying to visualise how the garden will work.
Some elements are pretty obvious. The bottom right hand corner gets the most sunshine, so that’s a good place to have a bench. And there needs to be a generous area of paving to accommodate eating and entertaining outside. There must also be a reasonably direct path both to the compost bin and the under-deck storage area, because nobody wants to divert when doing a quick job.
Where paths go is really important. You see mistakes in layout the whole time in towns – places where the designer has created a nice border or patch of grass but neglected to realise that the visually attractive zigzag of Tarmac represents an annoying kink on the journey for the foot traffic. People follow desired lines, taking the most direct route from the car park to the shops or the office to the bus stop. If there’s planting on that direct route it will just get trampled and the same goes for gardens.
There’s a saying, ‘measure twice, cut once’ – useful for both DIY and dressmaking. But it’s also applicable here, particularly if one is contemplating hiring a concretebashing machine to realise the borders of one’s dreams, but doesn’t necessarily want to break up an existing hard surface where a path or patio will go.
The garden is now highly contradictory – lavishly flourishing in some places and a cacophony of compacted hardcore and shonky slabs in others – but it’s a great opportunity to design in real time and real space. I’ve been laying out path edges using pots and other bits and pieces to see where we really walk and how the space works, and clustering containers to mimic the location of borders.
With a draft outline in place, I can tweak and tinker, moving things that are awkward or in my way. So when the day of reckoning dawns, I can be pretty confident that the layout will work!