Building benches and paths of desire
Places to sit in the garden? You’ve got to have them. Especially when the place is affectionately called ‘Rancho Relaxo.’
First the paths…
We took our time to figure out where to lay out paths and the words “paths of desire,” I’d read about stuck in my head. Paths of desire are where you really want to go.
“Landscape designers sometimes talk about “desire paths”: the paths traced by people’s habits of movement from one place to another, the paths that make clear where we want to go, and how we want to get there.” Dominque Browning in “Paths of Desire”
Regardless of where a professional designer would lay out paths, it’s good to let a little time to go by and figure out where you want to go on your place and build your paths there.
The first places to sit were old furniture I got curb shopping or from friends. These we put on the patio, …we had two, one the same level as the house and one down a level, built from stamped concrete in place of the deck that we had originally planned.
Old furniture from trash day on lower patio.
We had two level 70′ long leach lines as the start to our paths. The rest of the place is on a slope. Each year we’ve ventured further out building a network of paths in order to be able to walk out without tromping through weeds. I laid out a path going through the garden planted around the lower patio.…
