The best materials for the main walks are cement and stone flagging. In many soils, however, there is enough binding material in the land to make a good walk without the addition of any other material. Gravel, cinders, ashes, and the like, are nearly always inadvisable, for they are liable to be loose in dry weather and sticky in wet weather. In the laying of cement it is important that the walk be well drained by a layer of a foot or two of broken stone or brickbats, unless the walk is on loose and leachy land or in a frostless country.
In back yards it is often best not to have any well-defined walk. A ramble across the sod may be as good. For a back walk, over which delivery men are to travel, one of the very best means is to sink a foot-wide plank into the earth on a level with the surface of the sod; and it is not necessary that the walk be perfectly straight. These walks do not interfere with the work of the lawn-mower, and they take care of themselves. When the plank rots, at the expiration of five to ten years, the plank is taken up and another one dropped in its place. This ordinarily makes the best kind of a walk alongside a rear border. (Plate XI.) In gardens, nothing is better for a walk than tanbark.
The sides of walks and drives may often be planted with shrubbery. It is not necessary that they always have prim and definite borders. Figure 73 illustrates a bank of foliage which breaks up the hard line of a walk, and serves also as a border for the growing of flowers and interesting specimens. This walk is also characterized by the absence of high and hard borders. Figure 68 illustrates this fact, and also shows how the parking between the walk and the street may be effectively planted.
The borders and groups of planting are laid out on the paper plan. There are several ways of transferring them to the ground. Sometimes they are not made until after the lawn is established, when the inexperienced operator may more readily lay them out. Usually, however, the planting and lawn-making proceed more or less simultaneously. After the shaping of the ground has been completed, the areas are marked off by stakes, by a limp rope laid on the surface, or by a mark made with a rake handle. The margin once determined, the lawn may be seeded and rolled (Fig. 40), and the planting allowed to proceed as it may; or the planting may all be done inside the borders, and the seeding then be applied to the lawn. If the main dimensions of the borders and beds are carefully measured and marked by stakes, it is an easy matter to complete the outline by making a mark with a stick or rakestale.
The planting may be done in spring or fall,—in fall preferably if the stock is ready (and of hardy species) and the land in perfect condition of drainage; usually, however, things are not ready early enough in the fall for any extended planting, and the work is commonly done as soon as the ground settles in spring (see Chapter V). Head the bushes back. Dig up the entire area. Spade up the ground, set the bushes thick, hoe them at intervals, and then let them go. If you do not like the bare earth between them, sow in the seeds of hardy annual flowers, like phlox, petunia, alyssum, and pinks. Never set the bushes in holes dug in the old sod (Fig. 75). The person who plants his shrubs in holes in the sward does not seriously mean to make any foliage mass, and it is likely that he does not know what relation the border mass has to artistic planting. The illustration, Fig. 76, shows the office that a shrubbery may perform in relation to a building; this particular building was erected in an open field.