Garden Paths & Stepping Stones

by Tara Dillard, Mickey Baskett (Producer)

Pathways around your home can be the most striking outdoor element, providing a visual and physical guide through your surroundings. Instead of settling for boring straight-line sidewalks, why not create your own geography with paths that add art to necessity! Let this lush visual resource for gardeners and garden designers inspire you with its 125 different paths that feature styles from very casual to natural trails to elegantly formal walkways. Do-it-yourself installation instructions cover materials, elements of design, each step of construction, and maintenance tips. The value of your home will increase, and so will the pleasure you receive from walking outdoors, as the ordinary activity of going from one place to another reveals your sense of beauty and character. A Selection of the Crafters Choice Book Club & the Homestyle Book Club.

Genres: Gardening

144 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2007

Reviews

[Carolyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m sort of curious about the author now, because her bio gives her a lot of credentials, but this book... gives me questions! It is a wildly baffling book, more like a scrapbook than a publication. Her explanations were so confusing. It is not organized but was generously decorated with unrelated inspirational quotes from everybody, including Carl Jung. I marveled at the part where she used a proof text from Shakespeare to try to persuade the reader to build paths. She uses specialty garden terms without explaining them, or sometimes defines them pages later.

I wonder if Dillard’s first language isn’t English, because her word choices throughout were really unique. She seemed unaware of how ominous and druid-style-NSFW her descriptions got. Once she referred to a garden bench in terms normally associated with cemeteries. Then there was the garden planting scheme that seemed to have designs on the visitor’s virtue. Was that... on purpose?

I should definitely lay some responsibility for this on the editors. The book badly needed structure, copy editing, appropriate commas, and a decent layout. Also, fact checking. Her history was WEIRD: for instance, I’m not sure anyone has told her that Jesuits were not the only group that sent missionaries to the East.

In its favor, I can honestly say the book is full of pictures of garden paths and there are also many stepping stones. Many of the paths were quite nice and she included an excellent variety of them.

[Porter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as helpful as others I have read. Pictures were good though.

[Amberwench · Rating 4 out of 5]

Plenty of full page pictures in every style to inspire the landscape dreamer. Suggestions and considerations sprinkled with snippits of history and style origin. A must for the visual dreamer.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of great pictures to give you ideas when planning your garden path. Not much technical details on how to install, however.

[Candy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some nice pictures of paths, however the lack of organization, sentence fragments and typos detract from the overall enjoyment of the book. It starts out fine, but becomes more thrown together and random as it progresses.

[Margaret · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely, peaceful pictorial and guide showing many enticing options for garden paths. The paths I long for have 'eye-sweet' lines.

"Consult the genius of the place in all". Alexander Pope

"There are many ways a pathway speaks without uttering a word."

[Tami · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think I'll buy this - great book!!

[Leonard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful photographs of attractive gardens with instructions on how to do your own.