Blog de Puree

Red square pavers are kind of boring for a walkway. At least, we thought so.

One of the many projects this spring was to replace the lame red stone pavers in the front with irregular shaped pieces of gray slate, some with orange streaks and tinges. This was to create a more organic looking walkway.

After looking through tons of gardening and landscaping books and catalogs for inspiration and ideas, I settled on a simplified design for typical stone walkways. Simple because I’m just one man, and also because anything more would start to get a bit price prohibitive. What we ended up with as a cross between an informal woodsy stone pathway and a softened formal look with the creeping thyme and the use of single stones.

Here’s what we did.

1. Took out the old red brick pavers.
2. Widened the walkway area with a pick mattock and a shovel.
3. Dug trenches along both sides and inserted bendable landscaping borders to separate the walkway from the lawn. This will keep the grass from invading the walkway space and help to keep the mower off the chips for now. I also took the edging and wrapped it around the Boxwood shade gardens, but I’ll get to that in another post.
4. Installed the slate. Each piece sits on a bed of fine send to keep them from wobbling and moving. Our walkway consists of 14 pieces of gray slate that are slightly offset from a center line to give it a more organic feel. We set them off from center because we did not have a enough for a more typical stone walkway that uses more pieces and allows more flexibility of design.
5. Along the sides and between the slate, I planted 40 seedlings of Creeping Thyme, which we grew for two months this spring in a special seed-starting Bio Dome. (These are great for buying seeds on the cheap and planting your own flowers, shrubs, etc.) This will eventually fill in the dead spots, surrounding the stone with a bright green and durable carpet of scented thyme. You can also mow over it–a bonus.
6. Filled in topsoil around the slate and thyme.
7. Since the thyme is new, I added mulch to protect the plants, soil and give it a natural brown color to mix with the earthen green and gray.

Here’s the fruit of our labor for the new front walkway.

The new stone walkway. The dirt patches are filling in dips in the lawn.
They are seeded and we’ll get a thick bed of grass.