Create a Cottage Garden

The English cottage garden is a much sought after look. There’s no garden more evocative than an cottage garden with it's eclectic sprawl of perennials, roses, shrubs, and vines that are the essence of an English cottage garden.

The Cottage Garden (Shire Library)

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The cottage garden can serve many purposes - as a vegetable patch, a cutting garden, or a place to sit and enjoy the sights and sounds of your own backyard.

If you have plenty of time to garden, a romantic at heart, an artist or photographer, or just someone who enjoys a densely planted informal mixed garden that looks natural and unstructured (filled with interesting shapes, textures, fragrances and colours) then a cottage garden may be just the type of garden for you.

If this is the style of garden you imagine, then you have a wide variety of flowering and fragrant plants from which to choose. Some of the more commonly grown ones are:

• Roses – a favourite amongst cottage gardeners with a mix of bush, climbing, tea roses and carpet roses to choose from.
• Lavender – Along walkways, in containers or set amongst other plants.
• Old-Fashioned Flowers – Stock, Delphiniums, Violets, Asters. Verbena, Daisies, Cosmos, Pansies, Love-in-the-mist, Poppies, Foxgloves...
• Shrubs and small trees - Geraniums, Hydrangeas, Lilacs...
• Bulbs – Daffodils, Tulips, Jonquils, Gladioli...
• Ornamental Grasses

Culinary and medicinal herbs can often be found growing intermingled with the shrubs and flowers, or grown in containers ready for use by the home gardener in a number of ways:

• For adding colour, texture and flavour to culinary dishes
• For making herbal teas
• Homemade skin care products and lotions
• Homemade medicines and ointments

Along with mass plantings the cottage garden will often include several structural features and elements within the garden setting. This could include:

• A birdbath
• A Sundial as a striking focal point in an informal planting
• Fountain, pond or stream for the soothing and restful sound of water.
• Gazebo
• Wishing well
• Gazing Ball
• Trellis or archways
• Picket fences
• Plants in terracotta pots or hanging baskets
• Garden seating
• Brick or cobblestone walkways
• Sculptures and garden ornaments

Caring for your Cottage Garden

To keep your cottage garden looking good regular dead-heading of the spent flowers will prolong the blooming period. Cut back the foliage of perennials to the basil foliage when it is past it's best and destroy any diseased plant material to keep your garden healthy.

Leave some flower heads for the purpose of re-seeding your garden for next years growing period. Allow plants to self-sow and intermingle removing any tree seedlings while they are small or plants that tend to spring up in unwanted corners of the garden.

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