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Garden, Garden design

Discovering garden styles part 3: Cottage gardens

January 31, 2014

OK, we’re back with another look at a garden style, and I suspect this one is a bit more relatable to most people: the good ol’ cottage garden. We’ve already looked at modern gardens and formal gardens, but now it’s time to loosen things up a little.

C O T T A G E   G A R D E N S

The free-flowing nature of cottage gardens makes a gardener want to throw on a big straw hat and a pair of overalls and spend days puttering in it. It is all about color, and free expression and, well, charm.

Traditional Landscape by Akron Landscape Architects & Designers Healy Design Inc.

Plants are massed and abundant in a cottage garden.

Traditional Landscape by Walpole Landscape Architects & Designers NatureWorks Landscape Services, Inc.

They often seem to be place haphazardly, but sometimes they are a bit more restrained in plant choices. (By the way, this next photo is one of my favorite garden photos of all time.)

Traditional Landscape by Morristown Landscape Architects & Designers dabah landscape designs

They lend themselves to all kinds of hardscaping options, so long as the form is free-flowing. Stone walls bring to mind traditional English cottage gardens and paths of flagstone can look like they just sprang up out of the garden. The best paths are those where the plants soften the edges.

There are plants that immediately come to mind when you think of cottage gardens. Hollyhocks, delphiniums, shrub roses, nepeta, phlox and echinacea all say “cottage garden” to me. 
I also think of cottage gardens as mix of trees, shrubs perennials, annuals and bulbs. The most successful cottage gardens will have a layered effect, and care will be taken to make sure something is blooming at all times. 
The gardens of Anne Hathaway (William Shakespeare’s wife). Richard Peat photo
Cottage gardens work well in spaces of any size.
Jack Barnwell-designed garden at the Iroquois Hotel on Mackinac Island. The Impatient Gardener photo

C O T T A G E   G A R D E N S at a glance

H A R D S C A P E :  Many materials are suitable to cottage gardens as long as they have an informal look to them. It’s even better if they look a little “lived in.” Lines are using arching rather than angular. Fences are naturally suited to cottage gardens as well and perhaps none more so than the traditional white picket fence, although many other styles also work. 

P L A N T S : A cottage garden is a plant lover’s garden. Almost any variety of plant can (and should) be worked into the design. However, planting in drifts is far more attractive than one plant of each variety. There still needs to be flow in any design, even an informal one.

M A I N T E N A N C E : I think cottage gardens have peaks and valleys for maintenance. They will be a lot of work to establish, if only because of the sheer number and variety of plants, but once they are grown, there will be a lot of maintenance in spring and fall to get the garden cleaned up and not as much in mid-summer when full plants will keep weeds at a minimum. From there, plant selection determines how much work there is to be done. If low-maintenance perennials are chosen, you can probably sit back and relax in summer, but some plants need to be coddled a bit. 

G A R D E N E R  T Y P E :  Gardeners who love an abundance of plants will be naturally drawn to these gardens. The nice thing with cottage gardens is that if you don’t like where you’ve put a plant, you can usually move it elsewhere in the garden without having to redesign the whole thing (try doing that with a formal garden). Cottage gardeners love poking around their gardens and find it difficult to just sit down and enjoy them without popping up to pull a weed or deadhead a spent bloom. I think cottage gardens are also good for indecisive gardeners. You can have a bit of everything. But people who like a natural order to things might get the shakes around cottage gardens. They can be a little wild, which will work for some but send others in search of symmetry.

cottage gardens garden design
by Erin @ The Impatient Gardener 
8 Comments

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previous post: Discovering garden styles part 2: Formal gardens
next post: Even more garden styles

Comments

  1. Karen says: February 1, 2014 at 6:15 pm

    Aaaah! Thank you for that!

    Reply
  2. Ms. Wis./Each Little World says: February 1, 2014 at 10:10 pm

    If you live in Anne Hathaway's cottage then it looks like anything works! Otherwise I like the more restrained schemes like the roses and hollyhocks.

    Reply
  3. Donna@Gardens Eye View says: February 2, 2014 at 9:50 pm

    One of my favorite types of garden. Lovely pictures too. I am learning to use more natives as I design my gardens in a cottage style.

    Reply
  4. Heather - New House New Home says: February 2, 2014 at 10:17 pm

    It would be my dream to have this style of garden. However, I know that this will never happen because in reality I prefer a more structured look.

    Reply
  5. Loi Thai, Tone on Tone says: February 5, 2014 at 8:29 pm

    This is one of my favorite garden styles!! When I first started gardening, I thought cottage style gardens would be a breeze. They are actually quite challenging – takes a lot of planning and tweaking to get that free-flowing look that is natural, colorful and rhythmic. But I still adore it!

    Reply
    • Erin Schanen says: February 6, 2014 at 12:59 am

      You're right, Loi, it's all about the tweaking.

      Reply
  6. Casa Mariposa says: February 6, 2014 at 12:50 am

    I don't like structured, formal gardens and little boxwood hedges drive me nuts. I just want to take a pair of shears to the side and cut an escape route for all the plants penned up inside. I absolutely love the carefree exuberance of cottage gardens. The top 2 photos are my favorite because I love the backdrop of trees. :o)

    Reply
    • Erin Schanen says: February 6, 2014 at 12:58 am

      Ha! That cracks me up. "Free the plants!" I love it!

      Reply

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The Impatient Gardener

Do you love gardening? Me too! I'm Erin and I garden in Southeastern Wisconsin, zone 5. The Impatient Gardener is all about real-life gardening: the good parts, the bad bits and even the funny stuff. It's part information, part inspiration and a little bit commiseration. Thanks for visiting.

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Erin Schanen 🌿 The Impatient Gardener
I fell in love with gardening through container de I fell in love with gardening through container design and it’s probably still my favorite type of gardening. My trip to Philadelphia area gardens was full of so many excellent ideas. For several years I’ve been enamored with clustered pots, but in my opinion they work best when they are able to stand alone in a space. And you probably know me well enough by now to know that as far as I’m concerned, the bigger the pot, the better. Feast your eyes on these beauties and use your zooming fingers to really get into those nooks and crannies. 

Don’t forget to save your favorites because you know you’re going to be looking for them come next spring. 😀

Photos 1 & 2: Amazing container cluster at @longwoodgardens  that works particularly well because of the restraint used in the design. Also how many different ways is the universe going to tell me I need to grow agave before I actually listen?

Photo 3: This was probably favorite display I saw the whole time and of course it’s from the masters at @chanticleergarden This is a master class in texture. It’s also probably not attainable for the average home gardener because it relies heavily on tropicals that need proper overwintering in order to reach a good size. But there’s no reason why I (or you) couldn’t use this as inspiration to create a similar feel with other plants. 

Photo 4: Strappy foliage, bright orange and colorful pots create such a good doorway collection at @chanticleergarden 

Photo 5, 6 & 7: Similar colors were used at a patio doorway at Steve and Ann Hutton’s Owl Creek Farm home garden. A pot is perfectly framed by an arbor off a side patio. The front entrance has a pink theme (and an amazing feature pot that I couldn’t show here because all my shots are vertical). 

Photo 8: Back to @chanticleergarden where I could have studied this container planting for an hour just to soak up all the detail. 

Photo 9: And while I love a pot with a lot going on, never underestimate the power of a simply planted, gorgeous pot, like this one at @abunting64 garden Belvidere. 

#gbfling2023
I think every garden probably needs a little bit o I think every garden probably needs a little bit of water, even if it’s just a bird bath. All of the fabulous gardens I saw recently in the Philadelphia area incorporated water into them. Here are just a few examples of how lovely these water features were. 

@paxsonhillfarm @northviewgarden @brandywinecottage @longwoodgardens #gbfling2023
Gardens must have places to relax and enjoy the vi Gardens must have places to relax and enjoy the view even though we all know that most of us rarely take the opportunity to use them. The seating I saw in gardens in the Philadelphia area reflected their gardens and all were special. 

Make sure to share your favorite!

Photo 1:  I adored these perfectly lichen-covered chairs at @brandywinecottage

Photo 2: Great lichen game on this bench at Wayne Guymon’s mind-blowing garden WynEden. 

Photo 3: Perhaps my favorite seating moment of the whole trip was this chair in @jennyrosecarey @northviewgarden . Not only was it perfectly lichen covered (are you sensing a theme here?) but a volunteer cleome was growing right up through the middle of it. Unfortunately this photo of it isn’t grata because by this point in the trip my phone (I didn’t want to use my DSLR in the middle of the tropical storm so I switched to my phone) was getting very grumpy about the rain. 

Photo 4: I’d be happy to hang out on these chairs in @abunting64 ‘s gorgeous garden Belvidere. I loved this space. 

Photo 5: Color was the name of the game on this patio at Steve and Ann Hutton’s Owl Creek Farm. 

Photo 6: The most original table and benches I saw were at @abunting64 garden. This was a portion of the garden that was actually on the neighbors’ property adjacent to Andrew’s. It had been a vegetable garden but is getting a bit too shady so it will soon have a new life. 

Photo 7: We visited Barbara Tiffany’s Mill Fleurs in a deluge, which is a shame, and dotted throughout the property are examples of her husband Tiff’s amazing furniture. This was, called the Centipede was upholstered and quite different from the others. All were amazing works of art. 

Photos 8 and 9: The @scott_arboretum at @swarthmorecollege had some excellent seating, from brand new @deebenarc chairs to more lichen-covered charmers.

#gbfling2023
*** I can already see that some people do not unde *** I can already see that some people do not understand humor so let me just say this: 1. I was fully aware of the escaped convict situation (I’m an avid follower of the news, which is common for us journalists). 2. It’s ok to laugh about the fact that I’ve missed the Longwood meadow twice through weird circumstances while being a rational adult and realizing that I’m not making light of the situation that led to the meadow being mown. ***

I missed seeing @longwoodgardens beautiful meadow the first time I visited so I was excited to see it the second time. Not so fast! Turns out it had to be mown down during the search for an escaped convict who was hiding out there (at least that’s what I was told was the reason for the mowing). He’ll never see goldenrod the same way again! 😀

That whole situation was really unfortunate for @longwoodgardens (not to mention everyone who lives in the area), which had to be closed for about a week while the hunt was on!
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