Cottage Garden: 4 Attributes of Cottage Garden Design

A cottage garden is a plant and flower garden notable for not adhering to rigid customs of elegant landscape design.

The traditional cottage garden emphasizes packing your garden full of a profusion of different types of foliage and flowerbeds, rather than taking a more restrained and spaced-out approach to landscape design. Cottage garden flowers, plants, and succulents should appear like an explosion of pastel, primary, and secondary colors.

Cottage gardens originated in England. In the latter half of the 1800s, gardening experts and authors William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll popularized the English cottage garden as more of an herbaceous vegetable garden with a few flowerbeds as extra decorations. Since then, the focal point in cottage gardens has shifted from the utilitarian need to grow one’s own edibles to cultivating the aesthetic value of flowers and shrubs for their own sake.

Cultivating your own cottage-style garden rests on adhering to some key principles. Here are four of the most important cottage garden style guidelines:

1. 1. Annuals and perennials: Cottage gardening should be a year-round affair, so it makes sense to stock up your yard with a combination of annual and perennial flowers and plants. That way, you’ll have beautiful landscaping from your front yard to your front door throughout every season.
2. 2. Decorations: Complement your cottage garden with a host of other decorations to give it more of a human touch. You can incorporate a variety of birdbaths, picket fences, sundials, as well as DIY ornaments that suit your preferences and to add your own stamp of personality.
3. 3. Different-sized plants: Include tall plants and short flowering shrubs in equal measure. Cottage gardens often feature spires and trellises of climbing roses alongside groundcovers like phlox, dianthus, or shrub roses. Flower climbers can even wrap around fruit trees. The important thing is to give your cottage garden a natural feel, complete with the variety you’d find in a lush, outdoor area.
4. 4. Natural-looking beds and paths: While a cottage garden should look as if you don’t really have a garden plan, there’s still a need to introduce some rhyme and reason into the natural order of things. Let your plants grow as if untouched by your hands in general, but do your best to ensure each section remains within straight lines to ensure each type of plant (and its root structure) remains separate. They should also be subservient to the walkways you’ve planned, rather than the other way around.

A vibrant variety of foliage completes the organic cottage garden look. Here are fifteen cottage garden ideas for plants and flowers:

1. 1. Catmint plants: Aromatic green shrubs with lavender flowers, catmint plants serve as excellent ground cover for a cottage garden.
2. 2. Clematis flowers: Clematis flowers have wide-flaring, purple petals. Planting them in full sun will help them thrive.
3. 3. Coneflowers: Also known as echinacea flowers, coneflowers reach to the skies with their tall stems and drooping petals.
4. 4. Daisies: Classic, low-maintenance additions to a cottage garden, daisies also make excellent cut flowers if you’re hoping to give some as a gift.
5. 5. Delphiniums: Climbing plants with many flowers, delphiniums can add some variety to the height of your cottage garden.
6. 6. Foxgloves: Foxgloves grow tall and sprout flowers reminiscent of bells, making them suitable choices to frame a walkway.
7. 7. Geraniums: The ample petals and bright coloring of geraniums bring a lot of vitality to landscaping in a cottage garden.
8. 8. Hollyhocks: Tall, climbing flowers that come in a wide array of colors, hollyhocks require mulch to grow their best.
9. 9. Honeysuckle vines: The twisting vines and delicate, sweet-smelling blooms of honeysuckle fit right in with the cottage garden style of wild foliage.
10. 10. Lilacs: Lilac flowers bloom in pinkish, purplish hues. They grow abundantly, so they can quickly dominate a flowerbed.
11. 11. Lupins: Lupins are conical flowers that look akin to miniature, uniquely colored pine trees.
12. 12. Marigolds: Vibrantly colored with round blooms, marigolds can make a fitting addition to a cottage garden so long as you pair them with plenty of longer-lasting perennials.
13. 13. Poppies: Capable of growing over a meter tall, poppies complement the shorter shrubs of a cottage garden well.
14. 14. Primroses: Depending on which seeds you plant, you could have a rainbow of primrose flowers in your garden, as primroses grow in colorful bunches.
15. 15. Wisteria: A downward-hanging, lavender type of flower, wisteria creates a beautiful tunnel of sorts above a cottage garden walkway.

Grow your own garden with Ron Finley, the self-described "Gangster Gardener." Get the MasterClass Annual Membership and learn how to cultivate fresh herbs and vegetables, keep your house plants alive, and use compost to make your community—and the world—a better place.