Herringbone Courtyard Round a Timber-Edged Lawn, Pontypool

Behind this red brick house in Pontypool, the back garden is an enclosed courtyard with high brick walls round it and doors opening onto it from the house. We block paved the whole space and set a rectangle of lawn into the middle, so there is green to look out on while every path round the yard stays hard and dry.

The blocks are a brindle blend of red, buff and grey in herringbone, running right up to the walls and the back doors. The lawn is held in by a timber edge, and from its even colour it looks to be artificial grass, which stays green all year in a walled space.

Paving round a lawn, not beside it

Most gardens put the lawn on one side and the patio on the other. Here the paving wraps all the way round the grass, which does a few useful things in a courtyard this size:

• every door out of the house opens straight onto a hard, dry surface;
• there is a paved walkway right round, so the lawn never gets a worn track across it;
• pots and shrubs can stand on the paving along the lawn edge and move with the seasons;
• the timber edging keeps a clean line between the blocks and the grass.

Driveway block paving in the gallery

The last two photos come from driveway work in the area. One shows the team laying blocks by hand onto a screeded sand bed, next to a new buff sandstone patio and lawn behind trellis-topped fencing. The other shows a red herringbone drive, still wet from rain and lit by the house lights, running between new block walls with brick piers going up. That drive has its own write-up on our Pontypool driveway construction page.

On any block paving, the finish depends on the layers below. The ground is dug out and compacted, a sub-base goes in, and the sand bed is screeded to exact levels before the first block is placed. Sand brushed into the joints then locks it all together.

Pontypool gardens and hard landscaping

A lot of homes in and around the town have small, enclosed or sloping back gardens where a lawn is hard to keep. Paving most of the space, with a panel of grass for colour, is a practical answer. Our guide to artificial grass or real turf in Pontypool weighs up the two, and low-maintenance garden ideas has more.

See our patio slabbing and paving page and our turf and lawns page for the options, or landscaping in Pontypool for our home patch.

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