Home » Plants & Animals » Cottage Garden » Cottage Garden Design

Cottage Garden Design

© Barbara M. Martin

Please note: Thank you for visiting my Cottage Garden topic and reading my columns, published here from February 1997 through spring 2003! This Cottage Garden column was written by Barbara M. Martin and is Copyrighted, including any photos, by Barbara M. Martin. It may not be altered or copied or published elsewhere in whole or in part without specific permission from the author. I regret I am no longer actively editing or contributing to this suite101.com topic as of mid-2003. Happy Gardening!

This article is the first in my Spring 2001 Cottage Garden Design Series: An overview of cottage garden design and using a sense of enclosure in Part I, growing a wide variety of plants and working with nature in Part II, and nurturing the soil in Part III. And then, Follow Your Heart in Part IV.

Design Concepts for Your Own Cottage Garden

When you dream of a cottage garden, what do you see?

A successful cottage garden will be in bloom all the time, from early spring to late fall, or all year long in a milder climate. The garden will be chock full of plants, arrayed close together in tight spacing and intertwining to create a full, overflowing effect.

When this garden bursts into bloom, it does not create "a balanced, well planned and attractively coordinated floral display". Instead, the cottage garden offers a glorious show with wild abandon!

Surprisingly, the romance and beauty of the cottage garden depend on some common-sense, underlying principles. To achieve that overall, season-long effect, the gardener needs to do many things right and will spend much time tinkering to fine tune and complement nature's work. As you may have guessed, that casual "cottage look" does not happen all on its own.

In coming articles, we will look at the five steps of the process of creating and nurturing a cottage garden. The steps include creating a sense of enclosure, growing a variety of plants, working along with nature's own processes, feeding your soil, and following your heart.

If you are considering installing a cottage garden or are already involved with one, I hope you will find the coming series helpful and, perhaps, thought provoking.

Enclosure The first step to creating a cottage garden look and feel is to provide an enclosure to frame the garden. This can be the proverbial picket fence with arbors over the gates, but may be any type of separation you have available. Depending on your circumstances, a clear definition of the space can be achieved by using almost any type of barrier. For instance, you could use an informal hedge of fruit bushes or flowering shrubs or more formal espaliered apple trees; a rustic wooden privacy fence draped in vines, a stone wall graced with ferns or alpines or even a chain link fence cloaked in clematis can do the job.

The copyright of the article Cottage Garden Design in Cottage Garden is owned by . Permission to republish Cottage Garden Design in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.