Planting Ideas for Walkways and Borders

Entranceway

• A walkway gives your visitors directions to your home's entrance. Design an inviting main entrance walkway with border plantings that create mood with harmonious vegetation. Subtle shades generate a calm, peaceful ambiance. A border of mixed-height blue flowers such as campanulas, cornflowers and forget-me-nots blended with silvery dusty miller create a serene atmosphere. Bright colors add excitement and energy. You can create a changeable seasonal border with colorful tulips in the spring, overplanted in the summer with bright annuals such as low-growing varieties of zinnias; let mounds of perennial mums grow in the back of the border to replace the zinnias as they fade in the autumn.

High Traffic

• Just because a walkway receives high traffic doesn't mean you should give up on a border planting. A raised bed with sturdy sides will contain your plants while offering a level of protection from wayward footsteps or active youngsters. In high traffic areas, use tough plants that will withstand an occasional misstep or bouncing ball. Shrubs that you can prune to size are ideal. Boxwood or evergreen yews make excellent anchor plants that you can interplant with colorful coleus. Besides being easy to grow, coleus has many variations of leaf shape and color that provide textural interest.

Mass Planting

• A mass planting may sound boring at first, but this can be an impressive way to define a walkway. Mass plantings can make your garden walkway more formal. Daylilies that bloom all season, such as Stella d'Oro, are low-maintenance, and they create lush borders filled with flowers.

Curves and Shapes

• Curves add mystique and interest to your landscaping. A curved walkway breaks with the rigid vertical and horizontal lines of a building. Use shapes in your border plants as well. Use round-shaped plants, such as mounds of ornamental grasses, interplanted with mounds of coral bells or liatris. The floating blooms of coral bells or the tall spires of liatris add another dimension of interest to the mound-shaped foliage.