Cottage garden

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Roses, clematis, a thatched roof: cottage garden planting at Kerascoët, (Arrondissement of Quimper), Brittany

The Cottage garden is a distinct style of garden that uses an informal design, traditional materials, dense colorful plantings, and a mixture of ornamental and edible plants on a smaller scale than gardens typically associated with estates and public settings. Cottage gardens go back many centuries, but their popularity grew in 1870s England in response to the more structured English estate gardens that used formal designs and massed colours of brilliant annuals raised in greenhouses. They are more casual by design, depending on grace and charm rather than grandeur and formal structure.

The earliest cottage gardens arose out of the Black Death of the 1340s, when the death of so many laborers made plots of land available for personal gardens. Alexander Pope was an early proponent of less formal gardens, calling in a 1713 article in The Guardian for gardens with the "amiable simplicity of unadorned nature". Other writers in the 18th century who encouraged less formal, and more natural, gardens included Joseph Addison and Lord Shaftesbury. According to the late nineteenth-century legend of origin,^[1] these gardens were originally created by the workers that lived in the cottages of the villages, to provide them with food and herbs, with flowers planted in for decoration. Fruit trees would have included an apple and a pear, for cider and perry,^[2] gooseberries and raspberries.

Plants common in the traditional cottage garden included climbing plants, especially rose and honeysuckle, and hedging plants that included hawthorn, holly, and privet. Flowers with a long cottage garden history include hollyhocks, carnations, sweet williams, marguerites, marigolds, lilies, peonies, tulips, crocus, daisies, foxglove, violets, pansies, monkshood, lavender, campanulas, mignonette, Solomon's seal, evening primrose, stocks, lily-of-the-valley, primrose, cowslips, and many varieties of roses. ^[3] The method of planting closely packed plants was supposed to reduce the amount of weeding and watering required, but planted stone pathways or turf paths, and clipped hedges overgrown with wayward vines, are "cottage garden" features requiring well-timed maintenance.

Vernacular thatched cottages in Woburn Street, Ampthill, Bedfordshire, were constructed in 1812-1816.

The evolution of cottage gardens can be followed in the issues of The Cottage Gardener 1848-61, edited by George William Johnson, where the emphasis is squarely on the "florist's flowers", carnations and auriculas in fancy varieties that were originally cultivated as a highly-competitive blue-collar hobby.^[4] Helen Leach analysed the historical origins of the romanticized "cottage garden" in Cultivating Myths: Fiction, Fact and Fashion in Garden History (Auckland: Godwit, 2000) subjecting the garden style to rigorous historical analysis, along with the ornamental potager and the herb garden. She claimed their origins were less in workingmen's actual gardens in the nineteenth century and more in the leisured classes' discovery of simple hardy plants, in part through the writings of John Claudius Loudon. Loudon helped to design the estate at Great Tew, Oxfordshire, where farm workers were provided with cottages that had architectural quality set in a small garden—about an acre—where they could grow food and keep pigs and chickens. William Robinson's The Wild Garden, published in 1870, contained in the first edition an essay in part IV on "The Garden of British Wild Flowers", which was eliminated from later editions.^[5]

In Robinson's The English Flower Garden, illustrated with cottage gardens from Somerset, Kent and Surrey, he remarked, "One lesson of these little gardens, that are so pretty, is that one can get good effects from simple materials." From the 1890s his lifelong friend Gertrude Jekyll applied cottage garden plantings to more structured designs in even quite large country houses, and her Colour in the Flower Garden of 1908 has been reprinted as the cottage gardener's bible. In the early twentieth century, however, the term "cottage garden" might be applied even to as sophisticated a garden as Hidcote Manor, which Vita Sackville-West described as "a cottage garden on the most glorified scale"^[6] but where the colour harmonies were carefully contrived and controlled, as in the famous "Red Borders". Vita Sackville-West had taken similar models for her own "cottage garden", one of many "garden rooms" at Sissinghurst Castle; her own idea of a "cottage garden" was as a place where "the plants grow in a jumble, flowering shrubs mingled with Roses,^[7] herbaceous plants with bulbous subjects, climbers scrambling over hedges, seedlings coming up wherever they have chosen to sow themselves".^[8]

Hathaway family cottage in Shottery (near Stratford, Warwickshire).

The cottage garden in France is a development of the early twentieth century. Monet's garden at Giverny is a prominent example, a sprawling garden full of varied plantings, rich colors, and water gardens.

Today, a cottage garden is often primarily flowers and herbs, and casual looking by design. Many gardeners attempt to use heirloom varieties of plants in their cottage gardens to preserve the antique flavour of the style.

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[edit] Notes

^ Anne Scott-James, The Cottage Garden (London: Lane) 1981, de-mythologized the origins of the English cottage garden, and its treasured topiary among the vegetables and flowers, popularly supposed to represent heirlooms from the seventeenth century.
^ The raw fruits, considered indigestible, were not much eaten before the twentieth century.
^ The Pleasure Garden: An Illustrated History of British Gardening By Anne Scott-James, Osbert Lancaster
^ Jim Gould, "The Lichfield Florists" Garden History 161 (Spring 1988:17-23
^ Betty Massingham, "William Robinson: A Portrait" Garden History 6.1 (Spring 1978:61-85) p 63f.
^ Sackville-West, "Hidcote Manor", Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society 74 (1949:476-81), noted by Brent Elliott, "Historical Revivalism in the Twentieth Century: A Brief Introduction" Garden History 28.1, Reviewing the Twentieth-Century Landscape (Summer 2000:17-31)
^ The "old roses" Vita Sackville-West was rediscovering, were introduced from French growers in the 1830s and 1840s. See Graham Stuart-Thomas, The Old Shrub Roses.
^ Sackville-West, ibid.