The best garden paths are beautiful and inviting, drawing you or your guests away from the house into nature. Once you've created the right type of garden path for your outdoor space, you'll need the perfect plants to beautify its borders. Find out how to choose plants for garden paths.
Consider the foot traffic.
Depending on where your garden path is situated, people may step off it to enjoy nature up close— or the path itself may have gaps that need a little greenery.
If you expect more foot traffic along your path, try plants like creeping thyme, miniature thyme, or rupturewort (Herniaria glabra). These lovely ground cover plants work well between flagstones and in stone cracks, and they can all handle full sun. Many of them yield tiny flowers, making the pathway even more inviting.
Gauge the available shade.
While the varieties of thyme, scabwort, and rupturewort do well in full sun, other ground cover plants function better with some shade. If your path is partly shaded, try creeping speedwell, a hardy plant with white flowers.
Baby tears thrive in shade as well, and yield an abundance of thickly growing white and green leaves with pink flowers. Creeping jenny grows quickly and displays vivid green leaves with yellow flowers.
Think about moisture needs.
Does your garden path wind through a damper area, perhaps near a pond? Miniature rush is low-growing and serves well as a border plant; it prefers wet areas.
You could also try pixie carpet (Hypsela reniformis) which does well with shade and moisture and yields pretty white and lavender flowers.
Variegated pennywort grows rapidly around stepping stones and ponds, and it offers a lovely display of yellow, green, and white blooms.
Consider autumn color.
If you're looking for border plants that will look pretty in autumn, why not try barrenwort? It's a perennial with colorful blooms of purple, white, yellow, orange, and pink. Plus, its foliage changes to a lovely bronze hue in autumn.
Another gorgeous plant for fall color is bloody geranium. Its leaves turn brilliant crimson in autumn, and it's just the right height for edging a pathway or lawn in your garden.
Include native plants.
Be sure to do your research and determine which plants work best in your area of the country or in your particular landscape and soil.
For Ohio residents, varieties of geranium like wild geranium and Geranium maculatum form lovely pathway borders. Wild bergamot bee balm and yarrow are both showy and easy to grow, while hosta varieties like "Pandora's Box" and "Frances Williams" provide gorgeous foliage.
You can also use Midwestern plants like allium, switchgrass, leadwort, catmint, bluestar, or sedum. Sedum in particular is a hardy plant, resisting disease, drought, and heat while producing lovely green and white leaves with purple and pink flowers.
At Kurtz Bros., Inc., we have stones for your garden pathways, rich soil for your flowerbeds, and plenty of other landscape supplies for your lawn and garden. Contact us anytime to place an order or to ask questions about your outdoor space.