Down the garden path: planning the paving
21.08.2023 - 11:59
/ theunconventionalgardener.com
/ Emma Doughty
This is our garden plan for the front garden and the ‘back’ garden (which is at the side of the house, strictly speaking). The red areas are paving – a garden path, a wide patio and enough hardstanding to go underneath two sheds (one of which may turn out to be a greenhouse).
The idea behind the patio is that it runs the length of the garden from the patio doors, enticing you out of the house and down to where we’ll put the arbor and some sort of fire pit. As you walk down the patio you’ll be surrounded by the long edge of the raised beds, which will be planted with pretty/scented plants. The ‘E’ shape of the raised beds means that I can get round the back and reach into any spot to do my gardening.
Our initial thought was that we’d like block paving for the patio, in a mixture of colours. Slightly unconventional, perhaps, but I’m after fun and quirky rather than stylish perfection.
This week I started the process of finding someone do to the paving. The first guy came round on Thursday evening, and was pleasant enough. He wasn’t a big fan of the block paving idea, though, saying he “didn’t think it would look nice”. Faced with a number of online paving catalogues with small pictures, and no real idea of what I wanted, we choose a couple of paving slab designs and sent them off to him so that he can provide us with a quote.
And then I gave it some more thought, and looked at the catalogues a bit more, and decided that we’d picked some of the most conventional paving slabs out there. They’re nice enough, but they’re a bit… meh. And whilst we of course value an expert’s opinion on what would be the best sort of paving for our garden, we don’t need to take on board his personal opinion on what would look nice or not. It’s not
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