Other flowers ideal for planting at the edge of your garden path include creeping thyme, snow-in-summer, poppy mallow, and creeping phlox. Use caution with blooming ground cover plants that have invasive tendencies, like dead nettle, bugleweed, and vinca vine. If you grow a grass path, a mix of clover with the grass seed increases drought tolerance, and also provides fragrant flowers that nourish pollinators. Even if your carpenter skills are rudimentary, you can build a pergola in a weekend with a prefab kit for less than five hundred dollars. Handier gardeners can build a pergola with free plans like this one from Popular Mechanics. Paint it to match your existing architecture, or allow the wood to weather to a natural grey. If weed pulling isn’t your thing, use a weed prevention product like Preen that contains Trifluralin, which will act as a germination prevention agent for up to three months. Corn meal gluten has similar effects in organic flower gardens.
