When the British garden writer Christopher Lloyd declared that “gardening, like living, should be fun,” he must have been thinking about cottage gardens.
With their jumble of ornamental flowers, edible herbs, and fruit trees, the best cottage gardens have informal, idiosyncratic layouts that are like fingerprints: Each could belong only to the gardener who designed it.
Layout & Design
Brick walkways, old walls, rose-covered arbors, built-in benches, and informally rambling flower beds are quintessential design elements in a cottage garden.
Photograph by Clare Coulson.
Photograph by Britt Willoughby Dyer.
Let us not forget the picket fence, the single most emblematic hardscape element of the cottage garden.
Photograph by Britt Willoughby-Dyer.
Ornamental & Edible Companions
Perennial & Annual Flowers
Hollyhocks find shelter from the wind, growing against walls, fences, and foundations.
Photograph by Britt Willoughby Dyer.
Sweet peas.
Photograph by Britt Willoughby Dyer.
Photograph by Britt Willoughby Dyer.
Foxgloves, the quintessential cottage garden flower. Where would cottage gardens be without foxgloves?
Herbs & Flowers
In a kitchen garden in Suffolk, England, flowers and edibles are intermingled in raised beds separated by gravel paths.
Photograph by Clare Coulson.
Mint, chamomile, and pansies all make delicious tisanes.
Photograph by Aya Brackett.
Photograph by Clare Coulson.
At a former estate gardener’s cottage in rural Suffolk, in England, galvanized dolly tubs set the tone “for the wild feeling of the garden beyond with brick-edged beds spilling over with roses, Alchemilla mollis, and in midsummer lots of pastel-toned hollyhocks,” writes our contributor Clare Coulson.
Pots & Planters
Cold Frames & Greenhouses
Foxgloves for sale at Miserden Nursery. Get a jump on your springtime cottage garden by starting seeds now.
Photograph by Britt Willoughby Dyer.