Looking for pathway suggestions

I am planning a longish pathway from my driveway to my backyard. I don't know what material to use. Here are some details:

Driveway is packed sand/gravel (someday when I have nothing better to spend my money on, I'd love to lay some sort of flagstone for the drive)

The path (from the driveway) will cut through the middle of a perennial/shrub bed then turn a corner along the side of the house...

This section of the pathway will be bordered on both sides by shrubs mostly - hydrangeas, azaleas, viburnums and two dogwood trees.

Finally, the path will end with a small patch of lawn that DH insisted we had to have.

On the opposite side of the lawn there are two other paths - both bluestone stepping stones. I also have a bluestone patio immediately to the left where the path ends and lawn begins. The grass will go right up to the edge of the bluestone patio there.

Here are the options I've considered - and the reasons why I am hesitating on each one of them:

1. make the pathway grass so it will seemlessly transition to the lawn - I think it might look funny on the driveway side since there will be no lawn on that end

2. make the path bluestone stepping stones with groundcover in between - I don't have enough leftover bluestone and considering the length of the path, it would be costly

3. make the path some type of mulch or gravel- tracks mulch/gravel into the lawn and how do I transition from gravel to lawn?

Thanks in advance for your suggestions. For some reason, I always seem to get hung up on details like these.

Here's a picture of the section along the house. The hose marks the path (needs more shaping, but you get the general idea. The topsoil is where the lawn will be.

Here's a very fuzzy picture I pilfered from webshots of what I'm trying to make the path look like along the house with shrubs on either side...

Wow, another project. I am thinking that a grass path from the grass patch to transition at the other end with a few bluestone stepping stones set into the grass then fading to all bluestone steps at the end To make it more interesting you could set some other bluestone steps into the grass at an angle somewhere in the middle in a couple of places. Like a diagonal banding of stone and grass. But I don't know how much bluestones you have, but you could stretch it further if you used gravel around the inset bluestone steps. That would tie all your hardscapes. Stone, gravel and grass. Think of a green snake with brown and blue irregular stripes. Patti

Definitely not mulch. It sounds like there is a lot of bluestone already. I don't quite get your grass concern. Can you explain it more? Can you show the driveway side?

Thanks Patti and Victor for the thoughts so far. I will take a picture of driveway side tomorrow, but right now it is a clean slate (no landscaping at all) so I don't know how much it will help. I guess I just wonder if it will look odd to have a narrow grass pathway starting at the driveway when there will be no other grass visible from that side of the house. As I said, I tend to get hung up on these details because I can't always visualize whether something will look right unless I see it. It just seems to me that the grass paths I've seen are usually connecting two sections of lawn....no?

P.S. It's not really "another project". . . I kind of see it as the finishing touches of the first one. . . (DH isn't buying that story either!)

Ah, the "Just tweaking, Dear" story. I know it only too well. Patti

I know a lady who did a path and her whole yard with yarrow and mowed it like the lawn .... boy was that soft. I also liked a lot how the texture looked en masse like that.

This message was edited Jul 25, 2008 7:43 PM