Paths and Walkways [antikvár]

NTRODV/CTIONPaths throw the garden open to exploration. They set people into motion. The eye sees a path heading away somewhere and the feet follow, irresistibly, out from the house into the elements on a journey to tbe depths of tbe garden, even if that's only ten yards away.Flower gardeners will steer a path through the old-fashioned fragrance of midnight-blue and white sweet peas that bloom by the fence. Anyone who loves fall woodlands may swing a path under a ginkgo tree, just to be able to stand at the end of a cold November day ankle deep in a blanket of tiny gold fans and watch the last few spin down to the ground. An artist may take a path past stone-carved heads sleeping on a bank, then under blue glass bottles in the treetops shining bright against the sky. The garden is revealed in this way, by degrees, from paths connecting one beautiful point to another.In walking perhaps a hundred garden paths for this book, I realized that the most enchanting gardens are built by people who've learned not to be coy about what they find beautiful. They've edged their paths with blond boulders streaked with a red mineral that exactly matches the red of the barberry leaves; or with football-sized chunks of cloudy blue-green slag glass, which shoot specks of light into the shade under the trees. They've laid out grand flagstone paths to connect the terrace and the pool, but they've also laid paths to the places where they like to lingerperhaps it's the woodpile sheltered by a tin roof, a raked gray gravel path butting the mossy sawed logs, witb a chair right there to watch the rain slant across the garden and drip from the tin. Perhaps it's at the top of a steep bank, reachable only in a goatlike scramble up a ladder of stepping-stones, but worth the view of the river through a break in the pines.I grew up in an English farmhouse garden witb no path to speak of. The