Of course this end result happens due to lack of initial planning and as well as lack of overall space. It is a law of nature on my property that visible ground will soon be populated by another perennial ;).

Am I the only one that fails to leave some sort of path allowing visitors to more easily appreciate the scope and variety in your gardens?

i am getting too old to deal with this on such a scale (we haven't mentioned my 20+ other beds, have we?...) so this year i have a helper, who is a dynamo at weeding. she gets more done in 4 hours than i could do in a week. so far she has discovered clematis babies, several hosta and some hidden daylilies, among other nice things, all of which i had forgotten about. there is actually clear ground where she has finished! next will be applying Preen and lots of mulch. hurrah!

your photo is enviable -- wish my gardens looked so good. i definitely subscribe to your "law of nature" which means (for me) a lack of organization and overall design. le sigh.

Paths are definitely a must-have in my garden. I like being IN the garden when I'm in the garden :-) Paths make maintenance so much easier too. But, since I'm also a 'no bare ground' style gardener, the paths are not very wide. And there is one area of the front bed that I can't access easily because there isn't a path through it! And to 'retro-fit' a path there now would be too difficult because of estableshed shrubs, so I just live with that situation....

Paths are great for drawing you into the garden. There's something about paths that just seduce you into wanting to follow them to see where they lead.... I'm lucky that our garden is big enough to have room for paths without feeling we've lost too much space for plants. The paths I see when I look out the window by the computer often entice me to get off my butt and go out there to see what's happening in the garden!

However, because my property and garden are so small by most peoples standards I just couldn't do the proper width pathway. Isn't something like 3 feet the recommended width? Well mine is more like 1 foot wide.

It actually looks correct when you consider the scale of the garden, but it sure doesn't work for outsiders taking a stroll through my garden. I'm use to it, so I could probably walk it blindfolded, but other people are always stepping off the pathway into the garden and children are a complete nightmare. Because they don't walk - they run - they're always tipping over right into the garden and onto some favorite plant.

Nope. I don't allow others to wander through my garden any longer. They can stand on the grass and admire from there, but that's it.

Kevin

I tried to do something about it a couple years back by adding randomly spaced stepping stones, so I would at least have an idea of a "safe" place to stand- particularly in the early spring when tiny shoots were in danger of being stepped on. It has worked okay. It takes all my might not to replace some of them with plants though, LOL.
CMK

Me too. I do that in a few places and it does work well until - like you said - you realize the space they occupy and what plant you could put there instead.

Sometimes I'll carry a couple of short boards with me when I'm working in the garden and I don't want to step directly on the soil. I lay down the boards and only step on them. Easier said than done however, but it's better than nothing.

Kevin

My garden style is like eclecticcottage, I prefer a more cottage style garden. I do not like specimen planting with lots of mulch between each plant. If there is space it is covered with a ground cover plant. I like green as my weed blocker so I use ground cover plants.

But last night, dammit, there was an unreachable patch of weeds that's been bugging me for 2 weeks. So I work my way into the thick of it, where there is one accent rock I can stand on. I lost my balance and very nearly wiped out into a big patch of plants. I recovered by grabbing onto a tree branch but it was a close one. I was thinking what a great story that would have been!

woodyoak - have to agree with that statement. Perhaps it was subconsciously done but when I first moved here I instinctively incorporated walkways into my garden plans, I'm guessing due to the landscape design books I studied early on & prior to actually drawing my beds on paper. I had a sort of 'look' in my head that I was aiming for and over the course of time just kept moving toward it. I kept digging up patio bricks wherever I tried to dig with a spade, plus I saw the granite stepping stones my son laid out near his own house & liked the look of them. Also had the advantages of a pick-up truck & a skilled migrant worker who laid the walkways for me.

For a number of years it was my daily custom to go 'walkabout' along my stone & brick paths and assess/enjoy my carefully-designed garden beds. I'm proud of what I accomplished and now enjoy viewing them as a whole more often than assessing individual plants.

Beautiful garden, rouge!

My gardens, as everything in my life, are a victim of my complete inability to make a decision about anything. I love cottage gardens... but formal gardens are oh-so-elegant. When starting out I followed some of the advice about making beds only as big as you can reach into them (average about 4 feet deep) but that looks puny and so I extended them. I want those wide, meandering, sophisticated, House Beautiful-type pea gravel walkways, but can't maintain them and don't want to give up that much space to gravel (or any kind of pathway material) instead of plants, and so even my rustic field-stone narrow footpaths are getting overgrown, and certainly are not conducive to strolls in the garden by others. (As someone above said I could walk through my gardens blindfolded and know where to step!)

I do think, however, that as I get older it will be easier to have pathways. I find that I don't have the time and energy (mostly time - if I had more time (which means less work!) I'd have more energy!) to put into maintenance of my perennial beds, and so I'm beginning to do more with shrubs and lower-maintenance plants. I think that having pathways ties into that. One, I won't mind as much giving up space to pathways, and two, having REAL pathways will work better for maintenance, especially since I'm not a kneeler and need to sit down for extended weeding & plantings sessions... and that seems to call for more and more space, lol. I don't remember squishing quite so many plants when I used to sit down in the past, lol. I like to blame in on the narrow walkways but I think the real culprit is my wide butt....

:)
Dee

My beds aren't too deep, maybe 6'-8' at the widest, and I can access them on both sides fairly easily with a few exceptions - the major exception being my sunken patio. It has benches, so I can't just reach up and tend to the plants - I have to step up/climb over the benches, and that is getting dangerous because the wood is rotting. Problem will be solved when the new patio is put in next month :oD

I do try to leave enough space between plants to step into the beds to tend to things in the middle - like the rugosa roses that need deadheading or hibiscus that need pinching, stuff like that. I don't want anyone *else* stepping around in the beds, but I know how to maneuver in there without much difficulty.

I tried the stepping stone solution to cut through the beds on I want to go around to the back or side of the house, but I'm not very good at installing things and they ended up at the same level as the ground and even lower in some cases, so for the most part they are covered by mulch. The large stepping stones that were already with the house were very well done (in other words - properly...) so that path connects my upper and lower patios - and acts to pull the eye toward the other patio with plants placed strategically. So, yea - if done well, paths serve a purpose, not only to walk on, but to visually draw the eye to features.

It is impressive the ideas and encouragement one gets from this forum as just yesterday I went out and bought some flagstones and on the same day made a 'path' through a relatively new shade garden. There really isnt enough room to easily negotiate the route but it is the thought that counts ;).

Plus, I love that kitty sculpture! It has just the right posture. All you need is a catmint plant. :)

I do! He loves hangin' out near this "Walker's Low". Here they are in early June.

As far as paths - it depends. My newest garden is 30 feet long and ten feet wide at its widest point. Every ten feet I put in a straight path consisting simply of very heavy cardboard covered deeply with cedar mulch dyed black, I use black on the paths as a reminder to not plant there!
That said, since I'm only 5 feet tall, I can't reach into the middle of the garden even with the paths. Right now it doesn't matter - I lost a lot of plants this past winter so plenty of empty space for me to stand in. The future will be a lot more interesting...

The garden whose picture I posted in the first post received its first plant in 2008.

I know it is too stuffed but I don't have the heart to remove anything.

Someone accurately described it as a "mess of colour".

Our new shade bed with the recent addition of stepping stones is looking kind of sparse this year, its first year but I am resisting putting in more plants to fill in that space when I know/hope there is enough new additions to do that if I am a bit more patient.