English Cottage Garden

I put the question to gloucestershire based garden designer jacquie gordon for surely she would know having won a gold medal at the chelsea flower show for mr.

English cottage garden. To create this look you will need to choose plants that grow through and around each other as though they have been growing together for years. Clematis climbs over the arch with beds filled with fuchsia catmint campanula delphiniums foxgloves hardy geranium herbs and lavender below. An english cottage garden for instance wouldn t have a border row of marigolds around it with a row of other flowers behind it. Ilona has gardened actively for most of her life and has been a writer and webmaster online since 1998.

The overall effect is artless romantic and unstructured. An english cottage garden isn t for everybody. Homeschooled all 10 of her children. Certain plants are typical of this type of garden.

Updated on april 23 2019. They didn t of course. Although the overall effect is casual abandon english cottage gardens require careful editing if you don t want to. But the design principles they follow are simple.

Caption how do you plant an english cottage garden. English cottage gardens have a rich history. An english cottage garden has a distinct style an informal design densely planted with paths and hard structures constructed from traditional building materials. The legendary gardens of england have long influenced residential landscapes worldwide and are admired for their lush green lawns hedges and drifts and borders of breathtaking flowers grasses and herbs of course you don t have to live in great britain to enjoy the pleasures of cottage and english gardens with basic design principles and knowledge of plants that grow well in your region.

Homely and functional gardens connected to working class cottages go back centuries but their stylized reinvention occurred in 1870s england as a. It s more fluid than that and more chaotic. English in origin it depends on grace and charm rather than grandeur and formal structure. In medieval times they contained herbs fruits vegetables a beehive and often livestock providing nourishment for poor cottage dwellers.

The cottage garden is a distinct style that uses informal design traditional materials dense plantings and a mixture of ornamental and edible plants. Typically english cottage gardens have a colour theme a lot of different plants and virtually no news helicopters hovering overhead. The best cottage gardens look like they planted themselves. Few garden styles are as romantic and welcoming as the english cottage garden.

The english invented the cottage garden probably in the 1400s when even the humblest plots of land were pressed into service to produce food for families. A cottage style garden can be truly wonderful but is it right for you.