Constructing Garden Pathways

Building a good looking garden pathway is a low-tech project. It requires few tools and just a moderate level of skill. The biggest challenge I find, is that of planning. In other words, if you are just creating your garden and you get your pathways wrong, you may have a clumsy setup once you are finished.

Get Some Graph Paper

You can often buy a large piece of 1/4 inch graph paper from an office supply or artist supply store. Use this to create a scale plan of your building lot or your garden area. Accurately measure major landmarks such as trees, garages, playsets, etc. and site them on the plan. The blank area that remains is now yours to play with.

Visit a local garden or zoo or some other place that has garden paths. Note how they have gentle curves. Look at the spacing of the paths and how close they come to objects. Take your time and begin drawing the path or pathways on your plan. Be sure you make them the correct width on the plan. A 2 foot wide path is great for one person, while a 42 to 48 inch wide path is what you need for two people walking side by side.

Get Your Materials

You will need to get your stone and the leveling base that goes beneath the stone. Get your tools at the same time. All you need will be different shovels, a wheelbarrow and possibly a rock hammer and chisel.

Decide On Your Look

Are you going to do a sidewalk type path that has solid paving or are you just going to do stepping stones? The stepping stone approach is definitely the easiest way to go. It also looks very natural. An avid gardener will often plant small plants in between the stones for a very woods-like appearance.

The Solid Path

The chore of digging is made infinitely easier with a round point shovel. This type of shovel is made to slice into dirt. The tip of the shovel looks a little like the spade design on a deck of cards.

How much dirt should you remove? Since the pathway will not have any other traffic than foot traffic, you just need to remove the thickness of the stone you are installing plus 2 inches. The two inch space will be filled with small crushed gravel or coarse sand. These materials are basically self-compacting and allow you to adjust the height of the stones with relative ease.

The self compacting quality of these materials should not be underestimated. If you simply put your stones on the earth, your walkway stones may develop a troublesome tilt after a few months.

The stone you decide to use is rarely consistent in thickness. For this reason you need to adjust the amount of sand and/or gravel fill on a stone-by-stone basis.

Fitting Stones

Some - well actually most - stones are a bear to trim. Simply striking them with a hammer is not the way to go. A cold chisel and a solid surface under the points of the stone you are striking will often yield satisfactory results. Flagstone installers have a snapper type tool that allows them to trim thinner stones quite accurately. The snapper is sort of like a big vise that bites down on the edges of the thin stones.

It is always better to trim off small amounts at a time. Don't try to crack off large chunks at once. If you do, you will end up with many small unusable pieces.

Trim stones by drawing the line you intend to cut. Tap along the line moving the chisel with each moderate strike of the hammer.

Related Articles:  Natural Stone Pathway, Natural Stone Path, Suppliers of Natural Stone

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My wife and I have built several different garden paths. One of the paths was built years ago by me. This one actually is a dual purpose walkway. It connects our driveway to a side porch door. The curved path goes right through a shade garden under an immense pin oak tree.

I created this pathway using paving brick that I cemented to precast concrete pads. Each brick pad is about 17 inches square. I made a mistake and prefabricated the pads before I placed them. I underestimated how heavy they would be. Each pad weighs about 125 pounds! It was a nightmare trying to set and level each pad.

A Partial Plan

This experience taught me that you need to plan each aspect of a job. Kathy and I had a great concept and design, but I had failed to thoroughly think out the mechanics of placing the plan into action.

The lesson for you in all of this is be sure you can handle the physical requirements of the job. If you intend to build a garden path using native stone or some other heavy material, think about every movement. For example, rocks go into car trunks much easier than they come out!

Rock Spacing

My brick pads only have about 6 to 7 inches of spacing between the pad edges. They are so close that there is more brick in the path than soil between them. How do you get accurate spacing for a stepping stone pathway? It's easy! You just need to get your bare feet wet and then walk across a dry piece of concrete or blacktop.

Once you do this, you will have the center points of each of your steps. If you want to avoid taking uncomfortable giant steps in your garden, you need to make sure your stone placement matches your stride.

This method also demonstrates that large path stones may not work. My brick garden path is an excellent example. If my pads had been 19 inches square, there would be practically no space in between the individual pads. Remember, planning is everything!

Solid Garden Paths

A solid garden pathway to me means one with no soil in the pathway. I have been through botanical gardens where the pathway is simply gravel. There is nothing wrong with this as long as the gravel is very small - say 3/8 inch diameter AND angular. Never use rounded gravel for pathways. The stones move when your foot hits them and it is like walking in sand. Always use crushed or angular gravel for every aspect of garden pathway construction.

Another popular garden path design is to lay flat stones so they look something like a crude jigsaw puzzle. Each stone is separated by a one inch irregular space that you fill with crushed rock dust and small stone chips. This pathway takes more time to build but it is very distinctive.

Drainage - Think Roads

Have you ever looked closely at how roads are built? The next time you cross a street pay attention to the shape of the road. If the road is level, note how the center of the road is higher than either side. This is called crowning. Road builders found out years ago that standing water in a road is a big mistake and actually leads to premature failure.

You need to crown your pathway and keep in mind that water draining down either side of the path needs a place to go. If you don't do this, you may need boots when you stroll through your garden after a heavy spring shower.

The crown doesn't have to be severe. I doubt that you could feel a half inch difference in elevation between the center of your path and the edges. You would feel the difference if you walked across the path from edge to edge, but this isn't realistic, is it?

Take your time and select a stone that is affordable, durable and matches your taste. If you take your time, your garden path may well be your legacy!

Related Articles:  Natural Stone Pathway, Suppliers of Natural Stone, Building a Path of Natural Stone

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Brick Patios | This is the first house I owned! It's at 2865 Minto Avenue in Cincinnati, OH. The house is in marvelous shape. I took this photo in October of 2019 when I was back there visiting dear friends. See those windows on the second-floor dormer? My helpers and I created a chute that extended down and out from the window on the right. I remember dumping all the plaster from the second-floor rooms into it and from there it slid down into Tony Albanese's 1-ton dump truck in the driveway. I installed those concrete steps up from the sidewalk and they're still in amazing condition 44 years later!

Brick Patios and Walkways - The First Attempt Failed

Kathy, my lovely wife, and I bought our first home in April of 1975.  It needed a tremendous amount of work. When I first walked upstairs and into the master bedroom, there was an 18-inch skylight you could see out to the sky. Yes, a gaping hole in the roof!

It was an FHA repo located at 2865 Minto Avenue in Cincinnati, Ohio. The previous owners had defaulted on the mortgage. We bought it at an auction for $8,500. I spent the summer of 1975 with three helpers transforming it into a wonderful first home.

We fixed it up and sold it for $35,000 within ten months. I reinvested the profits from the house into a much larger house in Pleasant Ridge located at 6270 Robison Road.

Amateur Scientist

By that time, I was consumed with learning about building, rehabilitation, and remodeling. I was doing various experiments with techniques and materials. Yes, experiments. That's what most rookies and homeowners do with building and remodeling projects, they experiment. It's important to realize I was just 22 years old when I purchased that house on Minto Avenue. I was filled with enthusiasm, but was empty on experience!

You see, most people try to do a job and hope for good results just like a chemistry experiment. Anyway, I decided to experiment and put in a brick paver sidewalk at the second home on Robison Road.

Paver brick is not flagstone, but the installation of both materials is nearly identical. Continue reading this article and you'll discover how to install flagstone. You can also read about flagstone installation here.

What Brick Did you Use?

One day while picking up supplies at a brickyard I saw these neat, thin red clay paving bricks. They measured 4 inches wide by 8 inches long by 1.5 inches thick.

This patio was built with traditional clay brick pavers that are 4 x 8 x 1.5 inches thick. This is the exact same brick and look I did with my brick paver sidewalk at my second home on Robison Road. PHOTO CREDIT: Tim Carter

I asked what they were used for. The yard manager said that people used them for patios and walkways. Ah ha! Just what I needed.

Now, mind you, this was before those fancy-dancy interlocking concrete brick paving materials. I came home and told Kathy I had found a great product. In fact, I showed her a sample brick. She loved it. I had decided that setting the brick on a smooth bed of sand would make for a great surface.

How Did You Install the Paver Brick?

I dug the lawn up and carefully installed the sand. I put in about 4 inches of medium sand. I then used a straight edge to make the top surface as smooth as glass.

Each brick was placed up against an adjacent brick. It was a good-looking job - that is, for a while. Before long, weeds began to grow between the joints. The neighborhood ants colonized my walkway as well. The first explorers found out how easy it was to mine the sand for ant farms. One year later I started over.

How Did You Install the Brick the Second Time?

My brick paver experiment started in the summer of 1977 with the sand disaster. I then corrected it the summer of 1978. I took out the brick, salvaged them and dug up the sand setting some aside to use in my second installation. The rest I wheelbarrowed to the backyard.

I then poured a 5-inch thick concrete walkway with 1/2-inch steel rebar in the center of the concrete. The top of the concrete was 2 inches below where I wanted the top of the brick sidewalk.

I then mixed up Portland cement and the sand to use as a mortar to lock the paving brick to the concrete. I left a 1/2-inch space around each brick to add more mortar using a mortar bag much like a baker uses an icing bag to decorate a cake. It was a labor of love.

Do the Paving Brick Come in Different Thicknesses?

Yes, you can get different thickness paving brick. Be sure to read this column about exterior brick durability before you make your final decision. If you're thinking of a brick patio, you must first decide on your material before you begin work. There are two primary materials: standard clay brick or fine-grained concrete brick. The clay paving bricks are available most often in rectangular sizes approximately 4x8 inches. They can be purchased in two standard thicknesses: 1 1/2 inch and 2 3/8 inch.

Do Paving Brick Fade?

I'm partial to clay paving bricks because the color never fades. The color of the brick is solid throughout the entire brick. This is not the case with concrete paving bricks.

The concrete paving bricks are available in a range of shapes and sizes. Often they are available in five or more colors. These bricks are usually only available in one thickness - 2 3/8 inch. They're an excellent example of the new mortarless technology that has blossomed in the past 15 to 20 years.

My only issue with these concrete bricks is color fade. Pressure washing concrete paving bricks will destroy them in short order. The high-pressure stream of water erodes the thin coat of pigmented cement paste from the sand and gravel aggregate. Look at this photo of what happens when you pressure wash concrete paving bricks:

Here's a great example of faded concrete paving brick next to brand new ones that have not yet lost the colored cement paste off the sand and gravel. Copyright 2017 Tim Carter

Robert emailed about plans for a new brick patio. CLICK HERE to read his emails and my answer.

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Old Brick Patio Ideas | This is a close-up shot of the actual solid clay red paving brick I used on my mother-in-law's patio. Note how the width of two of the brick equals the length of one brick. This relationship allows you to create all sorts of interesting patterns. She wanted this cross-hatched pattern. Copyright 2022 Tim Carter

Old Brick Patio Ideas - Copy What I Did

The best old brick patio ideas are ones that come from your mother-in-law. At least that's what I discovered! She told me to use solid red clay paving brick for starters. Whatever you do, don't fall for the pigmented precast concrete brick that has a thin coat of red cement paste. This paste contains red dry-shake concrete pigment and wears off with normal wear and pressure washing. Look at these concrete paving bricks that were ruined by pressure washing. See the small stones that aren't red?

Here's a great example of faded concrete paving brick next to brand new ones that have not yet lost the colored cement paste off the sand and gravel. Copyright 2022 Tim Carter

How Many Ways Can You Install Paving Brick?

The Brick Industry Association will tell you that there are four installation methods available to you. In reality, there are only two that would ever be used by 99.999 percent of homeowners in America. The two that are used are the flexible base and the rigid base.

The Flexible Base System

The flexible base system is a combination of crushed rock, maybe gravel and coarse sand. Guess what? You can only use mortarless brick with this system. Mortarless interlocking brick are what you see in the photo just above. They're almost always made from concrete.

Oooops! I used thin, 1.5-inches thick, brick in my failed 1978 experiment with my inadequate (no crushed rock!) flexible base. This brick was meant to be installed with mortar, but I was so young, I didn't realize this at the time.

The rigid base system used with paving brick employs a concrete slab beneath the paving brick. This slab can be a steel reinforced slab or one with no steel. I prefer a steel reinforced slab. Both types of brick can be used on a rigid base. Do you see why you have to make up your mind before getting out the shovels?

What is the Best Way to Install a Brick Patio?

The best way to install a brick patio is to follow my detailed step-by-step instructions. You can find them in this amazing download PDF product:

This is the cover page for my detailed step-by-step instructions. You can get professional results but not spend thousands of dollars. The PDF contains photos, illustrations, video links, best-tools links, step-by-step instructions, and lots of secret tips.

The following is a very high-level description of what you need to do. I share HOW to DO IT in this amazing PDF file.

To begin your patio you must know where you are going to finish. Does that make sense? What I mean is that you need to establish a finish height and then work backwards. This allows you to establish the top of the dirt upon which you will place the first wheelbarrow of crushed rock or concrete.

A flexible base system requires a minimum of four inches of crushed rock as a base material. However, you can skip this step if you simply blend coarse sand with Portland cement. I share time-tested sand/cement system in my download PDF file. I built my first patio using this method and it looked superb 45 years later. Look for yourself:

This is the patio I built for my mother-in-law! Yes, it's just a small section. This photo was taken 45 years after I installed the brick. It still was in excellent condition except for the light coat of algae. The algae can be cleaned using certified organic Stain Solver oxygen bleach.

Some interlocking brick manufacturers may suggest six inches of gravel. Once this is in place, you need to smooth it and compact it. Compaction is best achieved using a mechanical plate-type vibratory compactor. It operates much like a walk-behind lawn mower. The only difference is that you sshaakkkke a lot while operating it!

Once the gravel base is in place, you top it with 1 1/2 inches of coarse sand. The sand is not compacted just yet. You smooth it off to the exact profile and the slope you wish the final patio to be. Once this is complete, you simply set the concrete bricks onto the sand. The interlocking bricks just mesh together. Undoubtedly you will have to make cuts where the bricks round corners or intersect border bricks. Saws, cutters, and chisels will accomplish all cutting tasks.

Now that we have gotten this far we can see how much dirt we had to dig. Let's see, we had six inches of gravel, 1 1/2 inches of sand and a brick that is 2 3/8 inch. That adds up to just about 10 inches! That's a lot of digging.

How Can I Dig Less Dirt?

So you don't like to dig? Well, maybe the rigid base system is the way to go for you. It requires 20 percent less digging if you use the standard clay paving brick. However, the placement of the concrete, brick and mortar between the brick requires more labor and skill.

To further complicate things, the look is often different. Using a clay paving brick with a rigid base, you can create a patio that has the look of a brick wall. You actually have mortar joints between each brick. The mortar can be colored or standard gray. The choice can be complicated, no doubt!

The Rigid Base System

This system is what I have used. My current house has thousands of clay paving bricks laid in a thin (1/2 inch) layer of Portland cement mortar. A 1/2 inch mortar joint is between each brick as well. The look is stunning. The deep tones of red clay brick match my country Victorian home quite well. Of course, Kathy picked the colors. I can't match socks much less house colors.

This is the rigid-base system. This patio was built with traditional clay brick pavers. They could have been set in sand, but laying them in mortar on top of 5 inches of steel-reinforced concrete creates a traditional look and feel. You can get detailed step-by-step instructions here sharing exactly how I built the above patio! PHOTO CREDIT: Tim Carter Copyright 2022

To begin my rigid base system I installed a four-inch-thick steel-reinforced concrete slab. I installed the concrete on top of two inches of pea gravel. This gravel allows water to escape from beneath the slab. Water under concrete in the wintertime can cause serious frost heaving! The gravel is not always necessary. If you use it, you need to make sure you connect a drain pipe to the gravel so any water drains by gravity to a low spot on your property. 

The concrete was poured at 4,000 PSI which allows it to resist damage from cold Cincinnati winters. The 1/2 inch steel bars are placed on two-foot centers in both directions. The steel is placed above the dirt so that it ends up right in the middle of the concrete slab.

Once again, you need to figure out your total system thickness to determine how deep you must dig. In my case, I needed to excavate eight inches of soil. Don't forget to slope your patio! Make sure that water drains away from your house. A slight slope of 1/8 inch every foot is undetectable as you walk across the patio.

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Concrete & Flagstone Tips

If you decide to try to build a brick patio like mine, you do not have to worry about the concrete finish. All that is important is that there are no high spots. Take your time and wiggle a board side to side across the forms you have built to create the shape of the patio. Low spots can easily be filled with more mortar. High spots will create a hump in the patio, unless you know how to sand a brick!

Flagstones are somewhat easy to lay. I prefer to install the border first. Remember to sort through the flagstones you have purchased. You are looking for the thickest pieces of flagstone. Ideally you should try to get a batch of flagstone that has fairly consistent thickness, but this is not always possible. The thickest piece of flagstone sets the tone for the amount of mortar that will be under each successive piece of flagstone that is installed. If you make a mistake and install a thinner piece of flagstone as your first piece, you will end up having a hump or a series of humps in your patio as you continue to install the stone.

Use a small torpedo level to make sure that the flagstones are not tilted. Lay out the stone to create the border. Do your cuts before you mix mortar. A rock hammer and chisel are used to score and cut flagstone. Have the manager at the stone yard demonstrate the easy way to cut and shape flagstone. It is not hard - it just requires a little practice. Chips that are generated from the cutting process can be used as filler in the mortar when you start to lay thinner pieces of flagstone. These thin pieces typically use up lots of mortar. The mortar for the brick laying is mixed as one part cement to three parts sand. When you place the flagstone into the mortar, tap the stone lightly to get it into position. If you have to tap more than three or four times, you have too much mortar under the stone. Too much mortar will also cause the mortar to ooze up in between the stones. This is not good as the intent is to grout the flagstone after they are all set. Once the border is complete, let the stones sit for 24 to 48 hours if possible. This will allow the mortar to get very hard. We need the stones to be set in place before we proceed.

Using a taut string line stretched between the border stone, you fill in the field. This is tons of fun. Just lay full stones that have been shaped to fit next to other stones. Use small stones to fill in gaps between large stones. You don't always have to try to chip a stone to make a huge jigsaw puzzle. If you want to fill in some of these larger "holes" between stones at the end of the project, that's OK. Don't forget to scrape out excess mortar that oozes out from under large stones from where the cuts go. If it dries and gets hard you will have problems.

Once the cut pieces are laid it is time to finish the grout. This is where you fill the spaces between the stones. This task is performed using a grout bag similar to what bakers use to decorate cakes. You mix up a soupy combination of one part sand to one part cement. The mixture should flow out of the bag with little or no squeezing.

It is important that no little rocks are in the mix. They will clog the nozzle. Over fill each joint by 1/4 inch. After a short period of time you will be able to scrape off the excess mortar without smearing the brick. Use a small triangular brick trowel for this job. The hard work will be worth it! It's best to do a small test pad to see if you are up to the task of doing an entire patio. Try it and see!

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