New Patio and Paths
After years of dreaming and planning, Rob and I recently had a new brick patio and paths installed in our backyard. The work was done by Mark Clark Construction and, boy, did Mark and his team do a great job! The patio and paths are quite grand—spacious and gracefully curving, made with eight and a half pallets of real, old-fashioned red clay bricks!
The installation took about three months and was completed in late March. In the weeks since, Rob and I have been working to integrate our new additions into the existing landscape—cleaning up construction debris, filling in any low spots in the neighboring beds with dirt, and mulching around everything with pine bark nuggets. We’ve also added a thick layer of pond pebbles under the sunroom windows (which look out over the patio) to help control erosion caused by runoff from the roof.
We have plans to surround the patio with native shrubs, along with some herbs and vegetables.
“We’ll plant some easy crops,” Rob said the other day, “like tomatoes and peppers.”
“Oh, and okra,” I said, “because it loves heat and has such pretty flowers.”
We’ve decorated the patio with our collection of old cast-iron benches and little table-and-chair sets. Blue-glazed terra-cotta pots filled with light pink SunPatiens for summer add a dash of color.
The patio is a great place to watch birds as they dart about in the surrounding trees. (Yesterday I saw a great-crested flycatcher!) If you enjoy box turtle antics, the patio is also a good place to be. I set out chunks of organic watermelon for the turtles (they’re wild turtles, not pets) under the nearby kumquat tree, and then we watch them feast.
Rob and I are talking about getting a fire pit so we can sit on the patio on winter nights and star gaze. But even if that never happens, even if we don’t make any more improvements at all, the patio is perfect as it is. We’ve only had it for about a month, and it’s already my favorite place to be in the whole entire world.
