From a rural cottage to a grand estate, an English country garden must suit that home and landscape. The garden, after all, is a reflection and extension of what the house itself suggests: order and shelter, but also expression, variety and color and shape. Whether an acre-wide walled garden, a mix of meadows, orchards or lawns, or a cozy cultivated patch full of flowers behind a two-up, two-down village cottage, the country garden is one of those things that Britain – especially England – does without peer.
With that in mind, Home and garden Talked to garden designers about three different styles of country gardens, before diving into the archives to see how past and present designers have creatively styled outdoor spaces.
Cottage garden
Defined by a colored mixture of FlowersThe humble cottage garden is ever popular and easy to achieve.
The classic English cottage garden is a much-loved idiom, popularized by influential gardeners and writers such as Gertrude Jekyll and Vita Sackville-West, and characterized by a delightful mix of colorful flowers, from marigolds to hollyhocks. From medieval times, this garden were productive as well as flowery, but in the Victorian era, the stylized cottage garden emerged, as depicted in Helen Ellingham’s paintings. Today the cottage garden is having a major resurgence, reinvented in the 21st century with our current penchant for naturalistic plantings. The modern cottage garden comes in many forms: it can be a gravel garden where poppies and other colorful favorites are allowed to self-seed, or a front-garden potager, in which herbs, vegetables and fruits are grown alongside flowers for cutting.
Garden Designer Joe Thompson Recent years have seen an increase in demand for this style of garden. ‘People want more lightness and approach,’ she says. ‘The garden doesn’t have to be manicured or minimal à la Noughties, and the cottage garden style can be adapted to whatever space you have. An unfinished garden now indicates some kind of character flaw – people judge less and look beyond the surface.’ She designs a lot Country gardens With a mix of cheerful plantings, especially roses. ‘Rose must be my key cottage garden plant, whether trained up and over in mounds to provide loose structure in a mass of surrounding perennials, or allowed to grow more loosely naturally.’
But perhaps the most important element of a cottage garden is its biodiversity and its ability to support a wide range of wildlife, from birds to pollinating insects – and its impact on humans. Joe concludes: ‘Of all the flowers on a plant it is the most wonderful thing to stand and watch a bee work its way, to see how the plant changes through its life cycle. You’ll be hard pressed to find more mindful and healing activities.’
