Comfortably Casual Cottage Gardens
04 Apr 2017
How to adapt Britain’s gardening style to Colorado
By Lisa Truesdale
“A cottage garden gives me permission to pack a wide variety of different plantings into a not-so-large space,” she says, touching on a basic tenet of cottage gardening—dense plantings of herbs, vegetables and flowers mixed in an informal way.
In 1982, the Cottage Gardening Society was established in England to “protect this vanishing planting style,” says founding member Clive Lane, who has authored several books on cottage gardening. CGS, which boasts more than 4,000 amateur and professional members, was concerned that too many people were moving toward easily maintained gardens, and that “hard landscaping was becoming more important than the plants.” So its mission is to encourage and promote this very British style of landscaping.
Lane says the cottage garden style has changed and evolved for at least 600 years, and predicts it will also look different 100 years from now. At first, he says, cottage gardens were very small, planted by English laborers who had little space, limited time and no extra money. The main purpose of their gardens was to provide as much food as possible for little expense, so they planted mostly vegetables, herbs and fruit. Flowers were sometimes included, but only if they offered a practical use, such as pest control, pollination or medicine.
Creating a Cottage in Colorado
Do you love the mishmash style of an English cottage garden, but don’t know how to create one here? Start with these tips.Think small
Use traditional elements
Plant close together
Incorporate meandering pathways
Add fun touches
Don’t follow the rules
