Paths
A path can look great and bring practical plusses to your garden. Most of us already have pathways feature in some form or another, but all too often they’re merely functional. Good design and skilled craftsmanship can make a path that’s safe and sound to walk – or cycle, wheel, or toddle – along and adds definition, contrast or boundaries to your garden design and value to your home.
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A well designed path can use a big palate of materials to fit into any space – and Cardiff conditions – and offer a range of functions. Give the route your pathway follows some thought too, and you can make it a design feature to draw lines, divide space, and give the illusion of size to your garden.
Parkstone Wales is an Award Winning Driveway Specialist based in South Wales
Parkstone Wales brings decades of landscaping experience – in the particular conditions of Cardiff and South Wales – to your path plans, and can add steps, driveways, patios, fencing, sheds and other garden structures to a bigger landscaping scheme.
Installing a path can is a quick but quite radical design tool. It can also open up your garden, particularly if you have mobility issues, and Parkstone Wales has designed many schemes for wheelchair users and carers with gentle inclines built into the design.
Parkstone Wales have built a business across Cardiff, Newport, the Vale of Glamorgan and across south Wales on word of mouth and personal recommendation.
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Parkstone Wales delivers on-time and on-budget jobs with wonderful workmanship, and superb materials from Marshalls, the UK’s most popular paving supplier, with whom they are accredited suppliers and regional award winners for 2018.
Here are just some of the pathways that Parkstone Wales could use to cut through your garden design scheme or landscaping project.
Various options to Choose from
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Curved and Curved-edge pathways: bring some relaxed design to your garden by taking the corners off hard-straight lines and giving an organic feel to your path. This is a lovely way not just to meander back through your garden, but also to provide a natural edge to a border-full of plants. Running along the top of a bank, a curved-edged pathway becomes a feature in its own right.
Straight paths: the obvious way to cut through a garden is with straight-edged pathways. It’s neat and tidy, easy to look after and a relatively quick and easy job to do. A path alongside your drive or up to your front door will often take the shortest route.
Stepping stones: over artificial grass or a real lawn or border, stepping stones – or log blocks – are an effective design tool as well as a practical way to work around dips and rises in your garden. Running “stones” over a bed of bark mulch is an attractive, organic way to employ stepping stone pathways.
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Steps: Parkstone Wales can work on split levels with steps. Wood (sleepers are popular), stone, or concrete works equally well and can suit a variety of schemes and settings to give an extra practical dimension to your pathway, or help build in split levels as part of a garden design.
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Crazy paving paths: a variety of materials can be laid in a crazy paving style. Commonly, natural stone or concrete are used, and are “broken” into irregular shapes to provide an attractive natural look that’s a classic favourite.
Permeable paths: We’re all becoming more aware of the effects of a changing climate and more extreme weather events. Large paved areas can cause more water run-off and contribute to flooding. Marshall’s provide urban drainage systems that can help manage flooding problems, and making your path completely or semi-permeable not only opens them up for planting, but also improves your drainage
Materials
Block paving paths: the gold-standard for many people is block paving: blocks of stone are laid in close patterns of your choice to provide a flat surface. Block paving can be treated like flooring tiles or wooden blocks, you can lay herring bone patterns, circles, or squares. By mixing and matching block sizes and spacers you can create fantastic patterns. Add another dimension to your paving by using contrasting colours at the edges of your paths, in patterns, or even as a random element. You can use textured heritage looks or clean modern paving stones.
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Concrete slab paths: the quickest and cheapest way to lay a pathway is by using concrete slabs. This is the paving you’ll most often see in public spaces and on pavements, because it’s good value and highly effective. They can run across almost any other surface, including through lawns (of real and artificial grass). Patio slab paths are at the more luxurious end of the scale, while so-called “council slab” is functional and good value..
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Gravel paths: a range of gravels offers a choice of colours and textures for a style of path that is both beautiful and functional – it’s a good option of drainage is an issue. Great value spar stone, slates like plum slate, coloured flints (golden flint is popular) and other stones can bring character to a path surface that’s great over larger areas. If and when you lose some of your surface you can easily top up with more.
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Natural stone paths: probably the highest quality and longest lasting of our path materials will take anything that the south Wales weather can chuck at it and still provide a solid base. Natural stone – in all its varieties – will last for decades, looking beautiful and providing the perfectly fitting backdrop or base for planting and other constructions. It’s also pretty much maintenance free, and looks better and better as it ages.
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Cobbled paths: if you have a cottage garden then cobbles might be the best way to achieve a timeless, rustic look. Cobbles, which can be fitted in a huge range of colours and textures, don’t have to be rural though, and can be a clean, modern look too.
Edges & Borders
Paths are generally edged. This gives you another way to pick the path that works in your garden and to your tastes. Hard edges support formal garden design schemes, but also offer a nice contrast to more natural gardening looks. Use organic materials, including sleepers, to blend into planted borders or lawns.
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Sleeper edging on paths: railway sleepers could have been designed for edging straight pathways. They offer real size and depth so they work very well as we construct a path that will work for the long term. They last well, but age beautifully in garden settings and around planting. Reusing materials is also a good way to make your path more sustainable.
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Slab-on-edge pathways: standing up a slab is the simplest and most cost effective way to edge a path. It can be discreet or turn your path into a hard-landscaping feature that really stands out from the garden around it; contrasting gravels or stone can make this contrast even starker.
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Concrete edging: pre-cast and custom designed concrete edging is another good value way to put a hard edge onto a path. It’s something you’ll see in a lot of public settings. It can contrast against a path of gravel or natural stone or blend in with concrete or slabs. A thin line of concrete is all that will show