A Cottage Garden
- June 2, 2010
- by: NGLM
- Magazine Articles
What is a cottage garden? Where did the idea come from? How can I use the cottage garden design for myself?
Everywhere today, gardeners can read about ‘creating a cottage garden,’ complete with graphs showing where to plant what, although that is the antithesis of the true ‘cottage garden’. So what does ‘creating a cottage garden’ really mean?
Cottage gardens are an English type of garden that has been grown for over 500 years. Let’s look at how and why the original gardens were grown and use that as our guide.
The cottage garden began in England (it is believed to have started during the Tudor Period in the 15th Century). It was the name used to describe a garden grown around an English cottage, so it was not grand, like the fabulously laid out gardensat nearby English estates. First and foremost, the cottage garden was a humble thing. No fancy or unusual plants (excluding the Victorian era!), just ordinary flowers (lots of them!), herbs or vegetables.
Which leads us to our second point of cottage garden ‘design;’ virtually anything that grows may find a home in a cottage garden. Since the garden provided more than flowers for the family, the traditional English cottage garden would have incorporated vegetables, herbs or fruit trees in it.
Don’t think you know how to ‘design’ a garden? Well, third, the English cottage garden was never actually ‘designed.’ It was primarily happenstance that created it, as most plants were traded with neighbors, or given to the garden’s owner.
The ground around the cottage was precious, which leads to our fourth ‘rule:’ cottage gardens are full, full, full of plants. Many cottage gardens have no grass at all in them. Every inch of space would be considered valuable, so the garden was filled to capacity with plants.
Last of all, the very last thing a cottage garden is, is neat. In a true cottage garden, plants would be allowed to reseed at will (because buying new plants is expensive), plants would betrellised upward to save space, and plants would be allowed to intertwine with one another.
A word of warning: the cottage garden is more labor intensive than the traditional landscape of evergreen shrubs and grass. There are ways to keep a cottage garden less laborious, however: plant perennials, grow roses that are more resistant to the diseases that are common to roses in North Georgia (like black spot), find plants that will reseed (like foxgloves) and most important of all, avoid grass (think of the time saver that one is!). Most of all, don’t try to have a carefully controlled garden! Don’t worry if the monarda are growing into the roses or the cleome has jumped out of its bed! Let it grow as it will, pour yourself a glass of iced tea, find a shady spot and sit back and enjoy it!
