A beautiful garden makes for a beautiful home, but are often times lots of work to maintain and care for. Outside of the plants themselves, caring for your lawn can be very time consuming. These creative garden paths are projects you can complete yourself: with inexpensive materials, and do-it-yourself attitude, you help your garden to really bloom!

1. Starry Garden Path – Fiber Optic Christmas Lights can add a really element of mystery and beauty and is reminiscent of fireflies on a warm summers night for your garden walk in the evening.

2. Lace Pavers – Patterning some boring pavers can be hard to do consistently for a row of unique tiles through a section of your garden. Using lace can help provide the same beautiful pattern on every one.

3. Pallet Wood Walkway – Garden paths can even bridge short distances without causing too much clutter, and add to the aesthetic appeal of a corner or small garden.

4. Glow-in-the-dark Paths – Adding beads that absorb sunlight during the day to the cracks in between the stones in your path can provide a very unique and otherworldy ambience to your garden during the night.

5. Concrete Stone Patterning – This design is both simple and effective. A concrete pouring stencil, when created correctly, can create the appearance of a unique rock patterning, without all the hauling. This also makes for an incredibly smooth surface.

6. Solar Powered Walkway – Solar panels might supplement the power of your home, but another beautiful utility is to have them power colored lights through the transparent glass of these tiles. You can use them as a pathway to help you navigate your yard at night, or just for decoration purposes.

7. Flagstone Walkway – This Flagstone surrounded by stones makes for a visually clean but also pleasingly asymmetric walkway. The placement of the stones also doesn’t distract the eye while looking very natural.

8. Cement Pavers – For a similar idea to flagstone, but with a much neater, crisp impression: try using identical cement pavers. These are perfect for creating straight and angular lines that function perfectly as a front walk or through a side garden.

9. Leaf Pavers – Adding some flair to your pavers can bring an entirely new life to your garden. Getting some local or exotic leaves can help you add the impression of the style of garden you’d like to replicate, while also remaining functional and durable.

10. Slate Path – Slate is an incredibly tough substance, capable of resisting erosion or breakage through plant growth. The material itself is also less expensive than many alternatives, and can be cut to create very visually defining walkways around and through gardens or hedges.

11. Brick Path – A classic brick path exudes status in a way that more utilitarian paths lack, and is also not the most difficult to lay with some simple tools. Also unlike some other options, Brick can be found in a variety of colors for very inexpensive pricing, allowing you to tailor pattern and color to your unique needs.

12. Gravel Path – For gently sloping edges and well defined walks, gravel can be one of the best minerals for creating a smooth and simple path. It also shines in very hilly areas, where a rock or other materials edges might not fit the natural contour of the land.

13. Concrete Walkway – This guide is a very educational concrete walkway tutorial for a more suburban or heavily trafficked area. This is also one of the more stable options available for someone building with moving heavy objects over it in mind.

14. Spiral Mosaic Path – Before you write off a fairy-tale mosaic styled path through your garden, know that most of the materials needed for this are simple stones of the same size and a sand-blaster for texturing. The rest is time-consuming, but obviously as rewarding of a project as they come.

15. Flowered Path – To add a natural touch to whatever area you’d like to loosely surface, add some simple but vibrant color from low-growing flowers such as violets or (here) Mazus reptans.

16. Garden Stones – Making a garden stone is most likely easier to do that you think, and to get a consistent size circle, all you need is a cake pan! Adding colored glass or even mirror shards can hold more light than you would guess.

17. Mosaic Stepping Stone – If you don’t have quite the ambition to create a mosaic style path or design, these tile sized mosaics still have all the same character, and are similarly built with small rocks.

18. Wood Slab Path – Treated lumber doesn’t have to be limited to exclusively planks and boards. These sawed cross-sections give a wonderfully organic and unique appearance to these garden squares.

19. Graded Sleepers and Gravel – If you’ve run into the issue of a medium to steep incline on your garden path or backyard landscaping, and gravel seems to be rolling downhill without giving any purchase, adding sleepers and leveling out your slope into a natural staircase can be an excellent solution.

20. Granite Walkway – If you or anyone you know does contracting of any sort, see if they have any leftover granite trimmings from countertops. These trimmings are often thrown away, but are incredibly visually appealing, even when mismatched. They make for an excellently unique walkway that can be bended with your strip sizes.