52 
House & Garden's 
STONE AND THE 
GARDEN PATH 
Paved Walks and How 
to Make Them 
T HE garden without walks fails in half its 
mission. It may be beautiful, as a field 
corner thick with wild asters and goldenrod is 
beautiful—but it is not wholly intimate and 
inviting. A garden should be more than mere¬ 
ly a pretty thing to be admired from outside. 
You must be able to wander through it easily 
and without thought of stumbling or treading 
on tender growing things, if you are to know 
it at its best. It must have paths to guide you 
naturally and without conscious thought. 
Of a variety of paths—gravel, earth, turf 
and others—let us not speak here. Each 
has its special place, each its particular 
advantages. But the path of large stones is so 
comparatively seldom built, and its good quali¬ 
ties relatively so little appreciated, that it calls 
for more than passing attention. 
In the first place, there is practical utility. 
Paths like those illustrated on these pages are 
always dry, firm and solid. There is no mud 
or dust to walk in, no grass to keep eternally 
cutting, no back-breaking raking, grading or 
filling to do after the initial work has been 
completed. 
And there are. other more esthetic but no less 
important features. There is something sane¬ 
ly substantial and forthright about the path of 
large stones. It knows where it is going, and 
why; it lends an air of permanency and de¬ 
pendability to the whole garden. The age and 
strength of the rock slabs contrast effectively 
with the fragile beauty of the flowers. To 
make the comparison still more marked, low- 
growing plants like snow-in-summer, speed¬ 
well and rock pink may be planted here and 
The paved garden walk 
lends an air of solid 
permanence to the whole 
setting, in contrast to the 
transient flowers. Olm¬ 
sted Brothers, landscape 
architects 
Regularly shaped slabs 
arranged in a geometrical 
manner are sufficiently 
formal in effect to fit in 
well with a scheme such 
as this 
there in the spaces between the stones them¬ 
selves. Along the sides, where their taller 
growth will not interfere with passing feet, 
plants of native wild columbine can lift their 
coral and gold heads in the May sunshine. 
The actual making of such a path calls for 
more care than the casual beholder would 
suspect. 
First, there is the matter of the foundation. 
This must be solidly made of well graded and 
packed earth, perhaps with an underlying layer 
of broken rocks for drainage if the location is 
low and tends to wetness. The level of the 
path, of course, should be raised enough to 
prevent surface water from collecting. 
The rock slabs themselves may be of native 
fieldstone dressed roughly flat on the upper 
side, or else irregular paving stones of the sort 
used for ordinary street sidewalks. In either 
case they should be of varying sizes and 
shapes, except where an extremely formal ef¬ 
fect is desired. Here uniformity of outline is 
called for. The limits of size vary according 
to the width of the path and the general scale 
of the surroundings, but as a general rule 
none of the slabs should measure less than 1 
or more than 3' across the longest way. 
