Natural Paths and Walkways

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Add bedding (tamped well) to groundlevel less one inch plus the maximum height of your pavers. Purchase bedding sand or "concrete sand" for the final layer to set the pavers in. This isn't mason's sand or sharp sand or sand from the pit down the road. It comes bagged. Spread and compact it till you have a solid 1" layer. Tamp it especially well against the flaps of geotex at the sides of the trench. Then lay in your pavers. This base will support any pavers that are even-thickness: thick slates, shale or other flat rock, cast-concrete pavers, or brick. Your supplier can show you the hundreds of patterns you can choose from and will supply half-bricks or a brick cutter for intricate interwoven patterns. Leave a quarter-inch between pavers—and to fill the space, brush and water in special joint sand (another bagged product you need to purchase). Keep brushing it on and watering it in for a week or two till the cracks all full.

I like bricks and some commercial pavers but prefer to collect my own flat rock from a quarry or river bed. In most locales, "found stone" comes in varied shapes and thicknesses and resists being set in any regular pattern or a flat, uniform height. Go ahead and dig the trench as above, and compact a firm base of road fill. But I'd forget the geotex and fancy sand. I set the rock, least-flat side down in a layer of common sand, and work the rocks around so they make the most level platform possible.

Then I fill around them with sand and water it in. Plan to top up the sand periodically, and don't discourage growth of low plants between the stones.

Indeed, I seed my paths with moss by collecting several clumps of low, tightgrowing moss clumps from an old log in the woods in the early spring. I rub greenery and the black root mass to shreds between my hands, mix it to a thin soup in watered-down buttermilk, sprinkle it on the path, and use the hose to spray the mix into the space-filling sand. Sometimes it takes. Sometimes it doesn't. But, a good moss chinking binds rocks or pavers in place for good.

Make Yer Own Pavers

If you lack local stone and don't want to buy pavers or rock from a nearby rock yard, you can make your own from concrete and custom-made plywood forms. (You can buy plastic paver-casting forms for about $35, but you are stuck with their choice of shapes.)

Look in the books and at local paths and decide what shape, color, and size rocks you want to walk over for the next few decades. You can make one-stone forms or multiple-rock forms.

I always make a scale mock-up of building projects. In designing things like paving stones I cut out various shapes from paper and try arranging them in a walkway. When I've chosen four or five shapes, I draw them full size on cardboard and transfer the pattern to a form.

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