The long and winding road
It’s taken him a while, but after reclaiming his garden path from five years of neglect, Frank finally realises the true purpose of a well-designed path
Frank Ronan finally realises the true purpose of a path
Ihad forgotten what the paths should look like and, consequently, how important they were. We tend to think of a garden path as no more than a good indication of how to get from A to B; that it should be clear but unassuming. It is the plants that matter and the path is the thing you stand on to look at them. Most of us would rather spend money on flowers than on stone and most paths, as a result, are little more than strips of mown grass half-heartedly edged with half-moon cutters whenever smartness is required.
There are worse things than a grass path (bark on membrane is an abomination), but it is far from ideal. You have to mow once a week for eight months of the year, and any plant that attempts a charming bulge from the border creates a bald patch. They are useless if the weather is wet, and unattractive if it is very dry. If they have to take heavy traffic they become mudslides. I have only met one person who claimed to enjoy edging, and edging in itself makes a strange conjunction. You need a strip of something solid and dependable, if only to run the wheels of your mower along.
I was lucky to be saved from all that because, as a moving-in present, an old friend who knew what he was doing took me to the local salvage yard to buy paving stones to get me started on the right foot. There was a mountain of beautiful black cobbles and we picked out a hundred to line the first bit of the first border. As the borders expanded I would go back to the same source for more cobbles, a hundred at a time until, years later, I had paths running all through the garden of a quality that I would never have considered affording had I to buy them all at once.
The cobbles run four abreast at the fronts of the borders, making an eighteen-inch strip of stone, too narrow, strictly speaking to be a proper path, were it not for a mown strip of grass of the same width on the other side, which is particularly nice where it separates path from meadow. Where the two main borders meet at a T-junction, the paths form a rectangle with a grass middle. The stones are packed into a bed of sand and so require weeding by hand once or twice a year, which is a nice sitting on the f loor with a sharp knife and a gin and tonic on a sunny evening sort of job.
Of course, during the exile it never got done and plants crept into the cracks from the border and grass f looded through from the other side, and they had to make do with being mown over now and again and the odd strim. After the return the borders themselves became the priority and I gave little thought to tackling the paths. It wasn’t until late summer (on the day after a weekend at a festival when I felt too delicate for proper work) that the desire to be sitting down on warm stone with a knife and a bloody Mary suddenly came upon me.
I really had forgotten what those paths could be like. The transformation after clearing them was greater than had been effected by any other job this year. Without those thin black lines defining it the whole garden had seemed to be out of focus, messy and uncared for. I had been thinking that there needed to be more structural plants in the borders but somehow no plant seemed quite structural enough. The better the picture the better the frame has to be. Of course a path has to be a route and a viewing platform and a way of keeping your visitor’s best shoes dry and a barrier between grass and border. But the main purpose of a path is, I now realise, beautifully and unobtrusively, to frame.
A PATH HAS TO BE A ROUTE AND A VIEWING PLATFORM AND A WAY OF KEEPING YOUR VISITOR’S SHOES DRY