When working on your dream garden, it's often tempting to cut costs by doing the paving yourself. However, this is usually a false economy for several reasons. Working on your own, you'll not get expert advice on the best way to lay stones and slabs out yourself to avoid wastage. You will have to buy the materials yourself, meaning you don't get the advantage of the discounts a professional installer can offer. Unless you are extremely skilled or extremely lucky, you'll never get an effect as good as the pros, which means you'll effectively be driving down the potential value of your home if you ever decide to sell. And however big the savings look on paper, the chances are they won't seem like fair compensation once you've lugged heavy slabs about for most of the summer!

Fortunately there are expert firms available to talk you through the various methods available. For example, block paving is a good value option, and simply involves regular-sized blocks of stone. Logistically it's not that different to stone cladding on walls, but rest assured the effect on the ground is considerably more tasteful! It's a very versatile solution because you have a wide range of choices of colours, block shapes and styles, so you can get custom-made designs at affordable prices. This method is also very resilient and can cope with heavy weights over a long time.

Another method involves taking freshly-laid concrete and using patterned rubber surfaces to press into it, creating the effect of individual blocks of stone, which can then be hardened and colours. This method goes by several different names such as impressed concrete, pattern imprinted concrete or stamped concrete. It's a great way of making the artificial material concrete look much more natural, and is particularly useful for gardens as there are no cracks between the 'stones' through which weeds and plants can grow.

Plain concrete paving can also work well as you can pay a low price but have countless options for size, shape, colour and style. You can even choose to have concrete which has been treated to resemble other materials.

For driveways and other areas where cars will be parked, you may want to look at highly durable materials such as Tarmacadam or asphalt. It's not as pretty as many paving solutions, but is more economical. Alternatively you can spend some extra cash and get a red tarmac surface, which looks very distinctive.