Ruth: I think your instinct to curve the walk is a good one. I'd also suggest curved plant bed. I am not sure that azaleas are appropriate for a spot that gets morning to mid-afternoon sun. There is a great book called Mid-Atlantic Home Landscaping by Rodger Holmes that will give you some very good ideas for landscaping your front yard. Imagine a nice small tree, like a serviceberry, sweetspire, a butterfly bush, and daylillies in a curved bed. There is a good book called Paths and Walkways by Hazel White that will give you ideas for your pathway.

I'm waiting with baited breath for examples also! Though there is nothing semi-formal around our place. Silvia has lovely paths in her back garden, but for me they were difficult to walk on. This is a photo she posted in another subject. Our 'most' formal path is still in progress, it winds from our driveway to the front door. We turned an area we traversed constantly into a formal path. We are using dwarf mondo grass to line the edge of the path. The path itself is brown mulch from Bolling Green. It compacts nicely to provide a nice firm and secure footing, and it looks different than the other mulch we have in the gardens. There is an ADA playground mulch that compacts very nicely that that I would really like to try, and it can be blown. I'm also interested in trying out 'crushed asphalt'. There was a patio of crushed asphalt in one of the demo areas at Epcot during the Flower & Garden festival that was quite nice, and permeable. I've got a picture somewhere if you want me to find it. The rock place in Sanford has granite fines. I'm going to bring home enough of those to test a short 4' or so path. Here are a few more of our 'au naturale' paths. Here, it is the grass that gets mowed on Mondays (picture today) is a grass path in my veggie garden area: This is what happens when the gardens and the paths are all the same type of mulch, hard to tell the path from the garden. Of course, sweet potato goes pretty much wherever it wants. I saw a picture somewhere, maybe here? A path laid out with poured concrete edging. That was lovely. I'd love to do those in our back. 'Flowerlady' down south uses roll roofing for paths. That sounds like a really good idea that I'm going to test out along our back fence. waves hello to Flowerlady Allrighty then, time for some more paths to chime into this thread! ~dianne

Yardvark, thank you so much for evaluating my proposed plan. I appreciate your comments and will try to address your questions as I understand them. I too had a problem with the sharp angled lines of the walkway. I think it was drawn that way to avoid the water/sewer access points that are imbedded in the flower bed. I had planned to change the sharp angles to curves, but I have to admit that I was having a hard time making a decent curve as our front yard is not too deep and the walkway would connect to the patio over a shorter distance than desired. The front flowerbed was already executed a few years ago and is actually not as narrow as it appears on the plan. The yellow highlighted path was existing to the property (our home was built in the 1950s), and as you note, it is somewhat narrow (probably about 2’ wide). However, it has been very convenient to walk around the property. Do you propose that we make that path wider? Other elements on the plan we did not plan to execute include the black squares on the driveway’s edge that represented large flower filled urns on black rock (and a small awning at the beginning of the front porch from the patio). The narrow flower bed that runs along the front porch would be eliminated. My main concern is that I feared that without distinguishing the walkway/patio/front porch in some manner differently than the driveway, it would look like a massive driveway. But since the front of my house is only bedroom windows, I needed to find a way to make a more welcoming presence and an obvious path to the front door instead of weaving between cars in the driveway. In your proposed revision, do you think the 90 degree angles of the patio/seating wall would be appropriate because the house has the same lines? I think it would look good. What material would you propose for the walkway/patio/front porch that would run alongside the driveway? My hope was that I could do some kind of stamped concrete there that would be complimentary to the driveway but subtly different that would distinguish it as the walkway. I am really taking your observations to heart and so appreciate that you took the time to give me your professional opinion. Your comments and suggestions are really making me rethink this. Thank you very very much! Kathy

Eighteen inches is certainly minimal for a planting bed... if you could figure out a way to do 24", that would open up more planting possibilities. It seems like you'd otherwise have a large expanse of concrete from the driveway and just extending that all the way up the side of the house to the front door seems unappealing and also HOT! I'm wondering whether, instead of a solid concrete pathway, something like poured in place pavers might be a good solution. They would help define the walkway to your front door much better than an extension of the driveway concrete would. For your application, you might want to just do a series of same-size rectangles instead of pavers of different sizes, but this photo gives an idea. The grasses shown (looks like blue fescue to me) would fit in your 18" planting bed and don't require a lot of water - there are quite a few small grasses that would work in the Yakima area. You could even go with artificial (!) if you're worried about putting any water near your foundation. You could also do planting between the pavers rather than river rock in order to get some green into the area, but that can be more difficult to maintain in an area that gets a lot of foot traffic.