Walkway gardens do many things for a landscape.  In the front yard, they can they create a feeling of warmth, invitation, or grand entryway.  We see a great deal of this in River Oaks, Tanglewood, and West Memorial, where homeowners will have a walkway, surrounded by vegetation, lead up to their front door.  This helps establish the tone of landscaping design, and it adds unique curb appeal to that particular property.   

In the back yard, a walkway garden can actually be a group of gardens tied together by a single, meandering path.  While there may be a variety of structures on the landscape, and several different garden designs at hand, one superb dedicated highway can direct transit from one point of interest to the other.  This is an excellent way to geometrically tie the entire landscape together into a unified theme without diminishing the uniqueness of individual forms like custom pools, summer kitchens, sports courts, and private patios. 
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Owners of small properties need not be concerned about a garden or a garden path dominating the façade of their home.  A professional landscaping firm like Exterior Worlds knows how to design these elements in proportion to the big picture, if you will, of the landscape master plan.  If the property needs to appear magnified, many garden styles will help make the house and yard look larger than they are.  Accordingly as well, if the house sits on an overwhelmingly large lot, much can be done with front yard gardens to bring everything into a new sense of proportion. 

It is important to hire a professional landscape company that has access to commercial-grade materials.  Never try to build a walkway garden using retail-grade materials yourself.  Materials are very important, because in many cases they establish the very theme of the garden itself. 

This is because every type of garden design is based upon a set of principles.  Some themes are intended to mimic nature.  Others, like contemporary garden design, emphasize the abstract capacities of human thought as supreme above nature.  Still others, such as formal gardens, use geometry to show that man is able to make nature more beautiful than nature itself. 

Water features are also something to seriously consider adding to a walkway garden.  The fluidity of water allows it to be shaped into any form necessary to support the intended design.  Regardless of the size or style of the garden you have, one can add some kind of water element water to the mix of materials and the plant life within.  Popular examples include reflecting pools, infinity ponds, waterfalls, custom fountains, and streams.

One common preconception that many people have about walkway gardens is that they all have to be as straight as a sidewalk.  This is far from the facts.  Linear designs are only needed if the architecture of the home demands it.  Many houses, however, can be better complimented with radial designs and circular forms.  Paths that lead are more enjoyable if they wind back and forth, and sometimes back around, to the source. 

Such a walkway is excellent for a garden that is relatively small in size, but will feel much larger once you start walking back and forth on the path within its interior.  In fact, many parks build their nature trails in this manner, in fact, because it creates the optical illusion that there is actually more acreage than there really is. 

You can even build walkways in water gardens.  Some of our more significant Houston landscaping projects involved the construction of walkways over water with floating stones.  These stones are secured by of concealed methods that make the stones stable enough for you to walk over the water’s surface

In terms of the actual width of the walkway, gardens on the average tend to have paths no wider than four feet across.  The actual width will be determined by looking at many factors, such as the type of materials used to build the walk, the number of people anticipated to travel it at once, and the height of the vegetation in the garden itself.