Bulletin of the American Rock Garden Society Volume 50 Number 2 Spring 1992 Cover: Iris iberica ssp. elegantissima by Rob Proctor of Denver, Colorado Bulletin of the American Rock Garden Society Volume 50 Number 2 Spring 1992 Features Paths for the Ordinary Gardener, by Geoffrey Charlesworth 83 Zenon Schreiber: Landscape Architect, by Paul Halladin 89 : On Paths and Steps, by Paul Halladin 91 Paths, by Nicholas Klise 101 Plants for the Pathway, by Steve Kelley 107 Paths in the Japanese Garden, by John L. Creech 113 On Edging, by Liz Rodgers 125 Plants for the Bog Garden, by Frederick W. Case, Jr. 129 Floyd McMullen Introductions, by David Hale 145 Departments Books 147 Paths for the Ordinary Gardener by Geoffrey Charlesworth ^^ou start to make a garden. The funny muscles kneeling and stretching. plot is roughly a rectangle. You are impa• So to get more garden, the time has tient to start planting and want immediate come to start a fresh piece, a separate results even if only a few annuals or a strip or even a new shape. When you dozen bulbs. You decide your garden will create this new garden, you have creat• be made in sections, a little at a time. So ed a path. Suppose your effort is to be you prepare a strip on the long side of a strip parallel to the first one and the the rectangle. It could be a rock garden, a same width. Automatically there will be scree, a perennial border or just a bed. Of a path dividing the enlarged garden in course, you love this bare patch of recep• two. You have only to make two deci• tive ground, and your imagination boils sions: how wide is the path to be? what with the possibilities of the Planting: what is the path to be made of? The moment you will put in? what it will look like? All the second strip is started the first ques• the anticipatory joys for which gardening tion is already answered. is noted. As the plants start to grow and Happy to be digging, you postpone even before you have any notion that you these decisions or rather refuse to are doing the right thing or that the worry about them and put your ener• picture you have in your mind will materi• gies into making a third strip parallel to alize, you want to enlarge the garden the other two. As you do this you are ready for the next phase. encouraged to see the plants in the first Your strip is generously wide, and strip growing happily, and the second you have a substantial garden going; as strip also doing well, its smaller plants you walk around the strip, you can just settling in. As you get to the middle of reach the center of it by raising your the third strip you notice a dandelion heels, or by kneeling and stretching, or insolently flowering in the middle of the by standing on a rock placed in the first strip. What do you do? You could middle. You can't make the bed any walk along the "paths" or you could longer and don't want the bed to be cross the garden. It's your garden so any wider because of a phobia about you can tread on the soil—even on the treading on soil in sneakers or using plants if you slip. But do you want to, 83 and would you want your spouse or the garden for a horticultural seminar. It best friend or visitor to do the same? is also reasonable to see a design on Absolutely not. You take the path and paper from someone you pay, and to pull the dandelion and walk back. expect the design to materialize in due It doesn't take long to realize that it course. But if you design the garden is not fun to work in a garden in which yourself, there needs to be latitude for a paths frustrate your efforts to reach certain amount of whimsy, with free• nearby points by compelling you to dom to dream in Winter, knowing full walk long distances. It is labor-intensive well you will rethink the following and, though good for your health, not Spring. If you find yourself jumping very good for your spirits, by the time over four feet of bed after you have your knees and thighs reach their built it because you can't face going the extremes of endurance. There are whole way round one more time, then many reasons for wanting to get to correct the mistake. Make a shortcut point A from point B besides the even if it means moving a few plants. compulsion to pull a dandelion (which after all could wait an hour or so). You Every kind of path has good points could have left your favorite claw or and bad points, and you have to decide trowel there, or you might want to what you can live with. Consider some carry a heavy bucket or a large shrub of the materials you can choose from: along this tiresome route. You can suffer an inconvenient design for 1. Grass. If you start a garden in a months without complaining because: field or carve it out of a lawn, the grass 1. You think you need the exercise. 2. is already there. Grass is pretty. The You consider the design artistic and color goes well with plants. Grass is therefore inviolate. 3. You can't admit living and organic, and you can shape it making an error. 4. Someone you love to any outline you like. Unless you live or someone you paid designed it. in desert country, lawns are usual, and Complaints spell trouble in either case. the gardening tradition we belong to 5. Besides health, art, pride, and claims it looks right. But there are respect, we have other absurd reasons disadvantages: Grass grows vertically, for not changing the way we live. This so you have to cut it. This takes time obstinacy ensures that we shall put up but also implies tools—scissors, shears, with endless inconvenience to "save edgers, lawn mowers. All of these bring face" or whatever you call it when only problems of fatigue, noise, smell, and one person is involved. ecological guilt. Grass also grows hori• zontally and will invade the garden. You Rich people and patient people have to weed it out of the beds and at design their gardens before making least once a year make the edge neat. them. They make little drawings on Grass stays wet after rain, after evening paper showing where the beds and the dew has fallen, and before the dew has paths are going to be. This always dried in the morning. I often wonder if seems to me to have an air of finality Tennyson's Maud who came into the about it which is contrary to the spirit garden after the 'black bat night has of a developing garden. It may work flown' got her feet wet on grass paths. well if you garden on a grand scale and Grass dies in drought, and it will have need cinder tracks for the horses, a to be watered unless you don't mind generous driveway and parking lot for brown. Grass wears out with constant visiting dignitaries, and enough room in use like installed carpeting that cannot 84 Bulletin of the American Rock Garden Society Vol. 50(2) be moved around to hide the blemishes the weeds themselves. Be wary of hay, near the entrances. Grass harbors too. This may seem like a good begin• weeds, so you will have to live with ning for a woodland path, but it is only dandelions, sorrel, and chickweed a temporary weed suppressant. Within a unless you waste endless hours weeding few weeks, the seeds in the hay will or remember to apply the right poisons sprout to give you a selection of mead• at the right time. Poorly drained grass ow weeds quite alien to your woodland can mean mud. Grass is a tyrant; if you and just as pernicious as the weeds that leave the garden even for a week in belong there. These organic paths can summer the first thing you have to do be used in the garden, too. They need when you return is get the grass paths weeding or spraying to keep them looking tidy—otherwise nothing looks clean. I prefer to weed, because I like to right. Grass paths look marvellous at leave violets, dianthus, hellebores, prim• their best, tacky otherwise. ulas, crocus, nigella, columbines, and so on in the paths. You can still walk, but it 2. You could try organic paths of sometimes needs a little care to pick wood chips, shredded bark, hay bales, your way along a crowded path without shredded leaves, or sawdust. Something stepping on something nice, even if of the sort is needed in the woodland expendable. garden, since grass grows poorly and Individual surfaces have individual artificial materials look wrong. All of faults. Hay is especially bad because of these cost money. All of them are the weed seeds and should only be subject to animal interference. It takes thought of as temporary. Wood chips about two weeks for the worms to occu• are coarse and need time to settle down py a new path and a few more days to a walkable surface; they also can before the surface is disturbed by a leave splinters in careless hands. skunk or a raccoon looking for a meal.