This article is part of 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.
Last week, we began with an introduction and discussion of the concepts that guide the cottage garden style. In today's article, we address two concepts important in cottage garden design: growing a variety of plants and how the gardener must work with nature rather than against it.
Grow A Little Bit of Everything The next "secret" to the cottage garden is to cultivate many types of plants. This is great news for the gardener who must have "one of everything." Your cottage garden will include not only flowers, but flowering trees and shrubs along with tubers, corms and bulbs, fruits, herbs, vegetables, and vines. If it is pretty and can be grown in the ground or in a pot, any plant is fair game!
This wide variety of plants allows you to work in three dimensions, adding a sense of scale with height and depth to your planting scheme. The woody plants offer an opportunity to expand the plant palette, as well as to add that critical physical and visual element of height so often missing in the typical low growing flower garden. Without those trees and shrubs, the space will appear flat and dull, especially during the winter when nothing is in bloom.
These bulky but essential plants will create a framework and add winter interest; they will also allow for a sense of mystery, even in a small space. They create pockets of shade for a more varied planting plan beneath them, too. Flowering vines may be allowed to scramble up through the taller woody plants, providing even more blooms in that area of the garden. This means twice the bloom for the space, always a good thing in a cottage garden.
