As a landscape designer, one of my favorite topics of garden design and construction is the garden path!
See, a well thought out and lovingly created garden path makes a garden come alive. It guides us to experience the garden fully.
From my professional design work and inspirations, I made this collection of my favorite DIY friendly and gorgeous garden path ideas,
A few helpful resources / books: ( Some of the helpful resources are affiliate links. Full disclosure here. )
If you want to dive in, here are a few of my favorite books with lots of great details on garden path construction!
- The Complete Pebble Mosaic Handbook: I just LOVE this book. So many amazing patterns and close-up instruction photos!
- Garden Paths: Inspiring Designs and Practical Projects: lots of construction detail drawings of all kinds of garden paths
- Sunset Western Garden Book Of Landscaping: gorgeous photos for inspirations, and detailed photos for DIY
The first group of garden path ideas, are loose materials: Wood chips, gravel or decomposed granite.
Pros: They are the easiest to handle and least expensive material. They are soft underfoot, but solid enough to handle heavy foot traffic or a loaded wheelbarrow. A border can enhance the looks of these pathways grealy
Cons: They need to be top-dressed every 1-3 years. If you need to shovel snow often, gravel is not the best choice. Not suitable for steep slopes.
1 . Wood Chip Walkway
2 . Wood Chip with Stepping Stones
Perfect for those who loves to walk bare feet!
3 , 4 & 5. Gravel Garden Path Variations
Flexible metal or stone edging (can be easily made from local rocks) gives a nice definition to this garden path, and keeps the gravel in place.
Gray colored gravel looks great in a Japanese style garden!
Fine gravel path with concrete pavers or natural stone landing areas create interesting texture and details.Continue To Next Page…
I’m working on a pebble path in our backyard that I’m in love with. Best part is it’s free since all the land around here used to be a riverbed.
We don’t have enough space in our garden to try out all these beautiful ideas but I can definitely incorporate some of the features there. Thanks for sharing 🙂
This is not helping my spring fever! I want to get outside and garden so bad… but I live in Canada… so I have some time to wait!
So pretty! Great ideas.
These are some great ideas! I love the river rock pathway, so pretty!
You showed us that Garden path is not just a large element in the garden but can be one of most interesting and beautiful. So many great images of garden path and garden edgings to inspire. That is a great post
in the grassy path garden you can see that they are just about to install garden edging to stop the grass growing to the raised beds.
I love the gravel with the stones and the brick pavers! These are so gorgeous!
I love the one with the little bridge. Ever since I saw a bridge like that in Skymall I wanted one for my back yard haha. Love all those ideas.
I love the little bridge too. I was hoping somewhere in this posting it would lead us to the site for building the bridge.
hi nadine! i will build a bridge next year when we move into our new home, and link the tutorial to it! =)
These are so beautiful! I love seeing photos like this, it reminds me of my mom who was a landscape {and interior} designer. Such lovely ideas.
So inspiring! Still don’t know what am I gonna do with our back yard, but the pictures from your post are definitely thought-provoking))) Thanks for a great post!
Ahh these are so beautiful!
Great post, lots of ideas to make a walking path beautiful… A couple years ago I added a walking path in our yard and used round stepping stones with wood chips to surround them. I received so many compliments on my work, and love coming home to such a beautiful garden and path.
I also like the old English ‘bumpy’ path, you’re right it has a lot of character(which I love)
These were all so great! Great list. It was hard for me to have a favorite but I think I like the glass bottle walk way the most. It is the most creative I think of all of them but each one was beautiful! Thank you for sharing, now I want to buy some land and put all of those paths on it! lol
I loved looking through these gardens, they look so tranquil and beautiful. A perfect place to go read, be alone with your thoughts, or meditate. Before they sold their old house, my parents had a zen-like garden in their backyard with a mediation maze and everything. Gardens are the best!
Oh my goodness – I just love greenery and gardens and we don’t do so well with growing flowers and gardens … but this gives us many of ideas – such beauty in all of them I can’t decide which is my favorite! Thanks for sharing these – I really truly love them all!
Oh those are beautiful! I wish I could grow a garden that beautiful.
I love all of these! I have to figure out what to do with my backyard. In the listing photos when I bought my house it was lush and green (it’s also huge, like my lot is big for being right in the city anyway, and my house is so tiny it takes up so little of it) but they killed it before I moved in. So it’s just a giant lot of dead grass and weeds at the moment.
I’ll definitely be putting in a vegetable garden, but I’m thinking a nice path and stuff to cut down on the areas I need to replant grass.
These paths are all so beautiful! I would love to have the pebbles with stepping stones in my own garden! 🙂
Wow, these gardens and photography are stunning! One day when I live in a house and not an apartment, I will have to try creating something similar!
Oh wow! I do believe I would take any one of these beauties in my yard! Maybe even… three or more. 😉
wow!!! very beautifull!… i like this ideas
All are stunning! Well picked! I am going to go with wood chip path with gum saplings laid down to denote the edges, then edged by clumps of Blue Fescue Grass. Then I am going to add some tree offcuts – sliced rounds of trunk or limb to make steppers across Mainly because it looks natural and we live in the mountains in beautiful gum forest area but also because the materials I am using are completely free! Lots of tree work going on in our area at present! Around that is a soft fall woodchip mulched area newly planted with Australian Native plants. Kangaroo Paw, Australian Woolly Bush, Westringia, Salvia, Acacia Cognata, Weeping Tea Tree, assorted Grevillia both upright and prostrate forms. Should look good when it grows in. I will have to post photos in a year or two!
that sounds beautiful carole! i LOVE grevillia moonshine! happy planting and come back to share photos here or on my facebook page!
So beautiful! It takes more time, effort and expense than others. While gravel is inexpensive, mosaics have a good design, look elegant, but it is a time consuming process.
Thanks so much for this post. I was getting overwhelmed with choices but this list is simple. I crossed off what wasn’t available here, too expensive etc. Now all I have to do is get out and start work!
wish you a beautiful garden Liya!! =)
I was so delighted to see my work as part of your beautifully curated story! Yes, broken concrete is a fav of mine and A) you’re recycling – always a good thing, and B) it’s inexpensive. The project in the image is actually a TINY side garden, so for those of you who think you have to “wait” to have space… look a little harder; you probably already have it!
Thanks again for including me in this inspiring post!
hi dawn! your project is GORGEOUS! thank you for inspiring! =)
Wow, I had no idea that well thought out paths like these could make a garden really come to life. Like you point out at the start of the article, they lead us to really gain the full experience of enjoying the garden. I’m new to all of this, so after reading this article, I’m going to really make sure that I take time of choosing the right path for my garden.
Thanks so much for this post. I was getting overwhelmed with choices but this list is simple. I crossed off what wasn’t available here, too expensive etc. Now all I have to do is get out and start work!
Wow, I had no idea that well thought out paths like these could make a garden really come to life. Thanks !