Pipe dreams of weed-free paths

One of the things that has really irritated us since we had the garden redesigned a few years ago, is the material used for the paths. Our gardener & I spend an inordinate amount of time weeding it. What is more when the surface is wet I, on my stool or wheelchair, tend to sink into it.

The path looks very natural, as though it is well trodden down ground with loads of small chips of stone in it. However, when the garden floods, or the blackbirds scratch around after worms sending soil flying everywhere, then the path softens & weed seeds invade. It is particularly bad around the circle of silver birches as the grass & wildflowers are particularly profligate with their seeds.

Every time our gardener comes I seem to spend the best part of two hours scrabbling around, digging out the weeds. Some weeks our gardener does too. Before she scatters the new meadow grass & wildflowers seeds - it was too windy yesterday - we thought it would be a good idea to get the paths remade in a better material.

A man came round to give us a quote last night. He was stunned by the size of the garden, as well as its beauty. The price was astronomical. For a resin based path it was going to be £10,000. It would maybe be a thousand at most less if we had a cheaper material. We all gagged. To make matters worse, many of the existing plants would be damaged, if not killed off.

We’re having another think. Our gardener went away to do some research to find out if she could come up with a better solution. Meanwhile I’m telling myself, much as permanently weeding paths gets to me, between us we are keeping on top of it. It tends to have the odd weed rather than turning into a green mossy path. We’ll just have to keep weeding. Maybe if we left an area by the path near the wild area it would stop the worst of the grasses & wildflowers taking root in the path.

There will be further discussions. One thing is for sure we’re not paying that sort of sum. That’s a lot of extra weeding time, years’ worth, we could pay our gardener instead. Maybe we should just pay her an extra hour a week to keep on top of things.