How to design your own cottage garden - easy tricks and tips
The Cottage Garden Design Course - Week 1
Welcome to all members, old and new - I’m absolutely thrilled that you’re here in this lovely community of people who love/like/quite like gardens. It’s a rainy, windy weekend here in the UK, so if you’re from any of the other 164 countries where our members are located, you may well be having a lot better weather than here.
But as I said here, I’m looking forward and using any grey wet days to plot and plan. So as promised, to follow on from the Small Garden Design Course (here - you can start this at any time), today we’re embarking on the Cottage Design Course.
This course has come about because of you. We’ve chatted so much about that informal style that makes us all smile - roses round the door, self-sowers seeding themselves round - and I’ve been thinking for a while that it would be fun to unpick the cottage garden with you, looking at its individual parts and seeing how they all come together, and working out how, without trying too hard, we can bring elements of it into our own gardens.
What do I mean by cottage garden? It doesn’t have to mean old-fashioned or twee, it’s more about the laid-back character of the space - a real garden for real people.
It’s a forgiving, familiar style which more and more people are finding themselves drawn back to as a reaction, I reckon, to the harsh geometry of white rendered walls and gardens designed to a grid. Soulless is not a word you’d ever apply to a cottage garden. And most importantly, it’s a garden style which lends itself to gardens of all sizes in both town and country.
If this sounds like something that appeals to you, and you feel you’d like to explore more and perhaps have a go at introducing a softer feel to your garden, read on.
What springs to mind when you hear the term cottage garden? For me, I’m walking down a winding path, roses arching overhead and around doors, with foxgloves and hollyhocks to each side and lavender and herbs spilling over the path. There’s a feeling of organised chaos and good use of space as lettuces grow randomly by some delphiniums. Bees are buzzing and birds are cheeping.
Abundance, layers, romance, charm - this is the cottage garden.