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Our garden has a lawn that slopes upwards fairly steeply to some steps up to a higher level. So it needs a path to stop the walkway ending up as mud. When we put it in we put some big stones that we'd found in the garden down loosely, and the grass grew around them. The end result was pretty good really, a hard path but it looked mostly grassy.
Now, I've just replaced the lawn because it was really crappy and full of weeds, but I still have to do something with the path. I was thinking of digging up all the stones and replacing them, and planting some kind of plants in between. So:
1) What plants can be walked upon? Original idea was chamomile, cos it makes a nice smell apparently
2) Is there any kind of rigid weed barrier that would sit vertically in the soil and stop the plants spreading into the lawn? Some kind of generic plastic would work I suppose, or if we could maybe find some kind of troughing, bury it and cut holes in the bottom to let the water in (or out, for most of the year!)
Hmmm - grass is probably the best hard wearing/lower maintenance 'natural' surface for paths. Chamomile etc will start to wear with much traffic and need hand weeding as a selective 'lawn weedkiller' won't work. Thymes, creeping jenny & a few others will work as well, as long as it's not really heavily trafficked - but none of them are as robust/low maintenance as grass.
Whatever you use you could slap down some turf reinforcement mesh - there are some that sink in to the soil and provide hexagonal 'pockets' for the grass/whatever to grown in, others sit on the surface and just help with wear.
I do rather like the stones though. Maybe I should just turf it and put the stones on top, let nature bed it in again.
I do rather like the stones though. Maybe I should just turf it and put the stones on top, let nature bed it in again.
Simplest and best long-term option, I would say, as you already have the stones to hand, and you're happy with the way they look. You could always find a few smaller, flatter stones to fit in between the larger ones, as a sort of crazy-paving path.
if you put in slightly sunken pavers you should be able to just run a mower over the lot, make it an interesting shape etc or do big rocks with alpines grwoing out of them and use them as the path
The clover and moss on our lawn seems unkillable, but it's green. 🙂