Blog

How to Choose the Right Material for Your Garden Paving Project

24 January 2020

Choosing the right material for your garden paving project is one the most essential decisions you have to make. If you think about it, you can easily replace or alter some details of your garden including but not limited to your plants, gate, and garden furniture. However, it is really difficult and expensive to change your garden’s surface once you decide on a material. That is why it is important to stick to a garden pavement for as long as possible. And choosing the right material to stick with proves to be a difficult task. Luckily, below are tips on how you can choose the right material for your garden paving project.

Stone

Stone is among the most luxurious of paving materials since it can be expensive to purchase and install. It’s also durable and versatile, offering an enormous range of colours, shapes, and sizes. From irregularly shaped flagstones for country-garden paths to precision-cut geometric blocks for a formal patio, there is a stone for every garden situation.

Gravel

Gravel is easy to install and provides an attractive texture ideal for informal landscapes, short-term paving solutions, and gardens built on limited budgets. The objections usually raised against gravel are that it can become weedy and too unstable underfoot. Weeds can become a problem if gravel is left untended, so it’s best to stay on top of them. Avoid rounded, tumbled pea gravel as well. Sharp, angular, unsorted gravel will interlock as it settles to form a firm surface that will not spill, furrow, or shift.

Slate

Often used as a flagstone, slate has a unique soft texture and subtle colour palette that visually draws people in like a magnet. Its pastel blue-greys to muted reds and lavenders are beautiful, both to look at and to walk on. The same quality that makes slate easy to shape into relatively flat pieces can also limit this stone’s durability as an outdoor paving material. In areas that experience heavy rainfall or freeze/thaw cycles, slate will often flake and chip.

Granite

For sheer durability, nothing can trump granite. It makes an elegant paving material for formal outdoor spaces and is often sold as cubes or brick-shaped pieces called sets or as uniform-size flagstone. Besides its hardness and durability, granite offers what may be the widest colour choice of all paving stones. From light through dark gray to greyish blue, tan, brown, honey yellow, green, orange, pink, and red—with or without conspicuous spots and blotches—the range seems almost infinite.

Limestone

Limestone is fine textured; so it takes on a distinctive, velvety finish when cut for paving. Its colour range is a bit more limited than granite or sandstone. Dark gray, blue-gray, pale gray, cream, and tan are usually the easiest to find.

Worry no more on your garden paving needs when you consult EB Landscaping. We are a landscape design and construction company serving Melbourne and surrounding areas that provide excellent advice and full landscaping services for your home property needs. Our experts will brighten and enhance your lawn and garden areas while greatly boosting your home’s curb appeal.

Optimized by: Andrew Ross Technologies