Grass Pathway Ideas: Creating Grass Garden Paths

Grass Garden Pathway
grass path
(Image credit: FatManPhotoUK)

More gardeners these days are making the decision to diversify their expanses of classic green lawn to create habitat for beneficial bugs and pollinators. As lawns give way to high meadows, it’s important to create pathways across them, and grass garden paths – paths made and maintained by mowing – fit the bill nicely.

Grass paths in gardens are pleasant to walk on and wonderful for separating areas of “wild space.” If you are wondering how to make a grass path, you’ll find there is lots of room for creativity. Read on for some cool garden pathway ideas.

Grass Paths in Gardens

The main problem with a classic lawn is that you have to eliminate all plant species but one to keep the area uniform. Lawn grass cut short doesn’t fruit or flower, which means that the pollinators and other insects that might otherwise help out in your backyard find slim pickings.

You might consider planting a variety of wildflowers and grasses to create a meadow. Simply allowing the grass you already have to grow tall allows other plant seeds in the area (including wildflowers) to grow too, providing biodiversity and interest to your new meadow.

You’ll need pathways to be able to move easily through the meadow plants, however. This is where mowing grass paths come in.

How to Make a Grass Path

Grass garden paths look like long, slender strips of a typical lawn. You get the feeling of lawn and a delightful pathway, while avoiding the downsides of a large square of lawn.

Before you decide to put in grass garden paths, you’ll need to figure out where the paths should lead. A path may be intended to provide access to a water element of the backyard or a utilitarian element like the compost pile or greenhouse. In this case, you’ll want to design as direct a path as possible. You might also want some grass pathway ideas to open up views to different garden focal points.

Mowing grass paths is also a great way to prevent neighbors from thinking your property looks abandoned. While mowing down a small border around the edges of your meadow can also help, maintaining a mowed walking path through a meadow gets the message through even better.

There are so many benefits to mowing grass paths. They make it easy to get to the best spots for picking wildflowers or watching squirrels and rabbits in your backyard.

Implementing your grass pathway ideas also facilitate spotting and removing of invasive species and reducing the chance that you might pick up ticks. 

Teo Spengler
Writer

Teo Spengler has been gardening for 30 years. She is a docent at the San Francisco Botanical Garden. Her passion is trees, 250 of which she has planted on her land in France.