Best Walkway Materials for Landscaping Your Home in Loveland, CO?
Your garden is your personal oasis — the perfect refuge when you want to get away from it all, and a cozy and inviting center for family celebrations alike. While trees, plants, flowers, and grasses will likely visually dominate your garden, the hardscaping you put in place allows you to enjoy all of that natural life with ease. Your landscaping walkways are one of the most important things to focus on if you seek to create a stunning and practical end result.
Best Walkway Materials for Landscaping Your Home in Loveland, CO?
Depending on your overall vision for your landscaping, the architecture of your home itself, your local climate, your budget, and your personal preferences, landscaping walkways can be made of diverse materials, each with its own unique advantages and disadvantages.
What are your best options if you are considering possible walkway materials for landscaping your home?
Brick
Brick walkways offer a timelessly classic look that will perfectly complement almost any home and truly shines in combination with whimsical gardens and romantic cottages. When you choose a brick walkway, you also choose a very durable and practical option that can shift without being compromised and is able to withstand all sorts of weather conditions. Brick is further easy to clean, and a lot more versatile than you may think. Not only can brick be cut into practically any shape these days, bricks also come in a variety of colors — from the earthy orange, you will immediately think of to beige, deep brown, or green. The way in which brick walkways are laid (a basket weave or herringbone pattern, for instance) also plays an important role in determining the aesthetic result.
Natural Stone
Homeowners who are aiming for a rustic look, or seeking to exude a more luxurious feel, tend to opt for natural stone walkways. Bluestone is an excellent choice for homeowners who want their gardens to have an entirely natural aesthetic, while limestone is a go-to in warmer climates, as it helps to keep the garden cool. Granite offers a decadent vibe. Once you settle on natural stone as your landscaping walkway material, you are still left with plenty of choices. Be aware that natural stone walkways can be more expensive to maintain, and are often unable to handle the acidity.
Gravel
Gravel walkways can be a great, and often overlooked, option for your landscaping walkways for a set of different reasons. Gravel is easy and quick to install, extremely budget-friendly, offers a very toned-down natural look, and allows for reliable drainage unless your soil is heavy clay. Gravel is additionally fast becoming the landscaping walkway material of choice for people who are committed to being environmentally sustainable.
Does your mind immediately wander to the ugly, carelessly installed, gravel walkways you may have seen in public parks? Think again. Your options range from pea gravel, which can have any color from white to tan, and from gray to chocolate brown, to decomposed granite, lava rock, and marble chips. Gravel, too, can scream “decadence”, and the sheer variety of options means that you can choose a gravel walkway that perfectly complements your softscaping.
Concrete
Since concrete is such a popular choice for walkways, it should be mentioned here as well. Homeowners who decide to use concrete for their landscaping walkways do reap strong benefits. Concrete walkways are incredibly durable, potentially lasting upward of 50 years, and they do not require much maintenance at all. What’s more, the days in which concrete only came in a dull gray are well and truly over; concrete walkways can now be delivered in almost any color of your choice.
Over time, however, concrete may heave upward, develop stains, and even crack — problems that can be repaired, but that comes with significant expenses. Furthermore, concrete walkways do not result in the most natural look.
Conclusion
Regardless of the material you end up choosing for your landscaping walkway, one factor that will never change is that the end result is going to be superior if it is installed professionally. Although homeowners can find instructions on installing landscaping walkways easily now, professionally laid walkways will last much longer, prevent costly fails, and ensure that your garden will be a pleasure to look at each time.
SOLMAUNA Creations & Landscaping Designs in Colorado
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