The white clapboard tennis house wasn’t just another pretty-face feature. Landscape designer David Thorn had sited the charming structure to serve as a focal point of views from a stone colonial. No ordinary walkway between the two would do.
“They wanted a creative connection to the tennis house,” says Thorn of David Thorn Design & Project Management in Chagrin Falls.
Thorn responded by creating a lawn allee (French for “aisle”), a grass path lined with trees and shrubs.
“It’s almost like the hallway of a house,” he says.
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The concept most likely originated in the formal gardens of 17th- and 18th-century Europe as a grand way to connect spaces and, as in the case of the tennis house, extend views to a terminal feature.
“It’s all about the experience. It’s all about going from one part of the property to the next and journeying through each space,” he explains. “[The lawn allee] creates a softer visual appearance. Not every path system has to be paved.”
He notes that the lawn allee is an environmentally greener alternative to a paved walk because it reduces stormwater runoff.
To create this particular allee, Thorn ordered plinths hand-carved out of barn stone salvaged from deconstructed railroad overpasses to flank an entrance between twin boxwood hedges. Workers seeded the 6-foot-wide path with a Kentucky bluegrass mix, a blend of bluegrasses, along with fescue, perennial and annual rye, which yields a more durable lawn.
“If we get into a drought situation, [or] a particular grass variety is attacked by a bug or a drought, there are other blades of grass to carry that lawn through so it doesn’t completely die,” he says. “In Ohio, because of all the different weather conditions we have and drought conditions we sometimes get, it’s critical to have it be a mix.”
Thorn planted nine specimen-grade clump-form birch trees, each 18 feet tall, on either side of the 80-foot-long path to the tennis house’s little-white-church entrance. He then filled in the beds with pachysandra, an evergreen ground cover that forms a dense mat of spoon-shaped leaves.
“It can handle the deep shade, and it’s just a super hardy ground cover,” he says of the plant. “It gets a little white flower [in the early spring]. But you don’t really buy it for the flower.”
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Thorn also used lawn allees to direct traffic to the property’s other outdoor living areas, including a stone seating area for entertaining and a meditation garden with a gazebo.
But Thorn points out that the feature doesn’t have to lead to an elaborate garden or resort-caliber amenity. He installed a 50-foot-long one that dead-ends at a simple bench stationed just to the right of a white Western Reserve-style pool house. He lined the 4-foot-wide path with crabapple trees, eight on each side, planted in beds of pachysandra.
“It’s a classic design element that really married well with the house,” he says. “This allee happens to be lined up on a sitting room at the end of the house. So when [the homeowners] look out of the window, which is a very strong viewpoint, it creates this really beautiful effect year round.”
While the lawn allee does lend itself to connecting outdoor spaces on large properties, it can be used on smaller counterparts. Thorn remembers installing one in the 8-foot-wide side yard of his first home’s “postage-stamp lot.”
“I had a 2-foot-wide path with trees on each side of it,” he says. “And it became the most special part of the property.”
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