This is the first of a series trying to capture the essence of different garden styles. ‘Style Counsel’ will be a series of snippets – just a few words and images. I’d love to hear your comments on these and please add your own thoughts on what makes up these different styles – and if you have some pictures to add that’s even better. So, what is a Cottage Garden?
Cottage gardens have layouts that are simple and often geometric, though many have a more sinuous layout with twists and turns, especially as the garden moves further away from the cottage /house, where more natural, wilder planting can prevail.
Key characteristics include:
- Profuse planting featuring many herbaceous perennials such as Delphinium, Stocks, Hollyhock, Lupin, ‘signature’ annuals such as Sweet Peas and Marigolds and a few evergreen shrubs for winter interest and structure
- Rustic furniture made out of rough timber
- ‘Roses round the door’, and on arbours or other structures
- Weathered paths often made from old bricks or rammed earth with simple, if any, edging tiles or boards
- Vegetables, fruit and herbs often mixed in with the flowers
Old School Gardener
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Old School Garden 
For me a Cottage Garden is not just a style you describe it is a traditional way of life . A holistic self sustaining organic system which works in tune with its wildlife. It includes the keeping of chickens to produce lovely eggs and add to the fertility of the soil. In the past this would have also included a cottage pig but I am too soft hearted to cope with the outcome.
Thanks Sue- I agree, cottage gardening was (and can still be) a way of life with the animal additions you suggest! My post about Cherry Tree Cottage garden at Gressenhall (see http://wp.me/p2XHES-Be) alludes to this and that garden is attempting to recreate something of the atmosphere and techniques used in the 1930’s cottage garden (minus the pig!). I guess that today the ‘style’ has been adopted in garden design most of the time without the acccompanying way of life as functionally, gardens are for many (most?) people meeting a diffferent set of functional needs- but maybe we should be returning to the self sustainability that cottage gardening used to represent!
I love cottage gardens, full of colour but not staged.
Hi Annabel- thanks for stopping by!