home sectionhome section
A garden walkway shapes the visitor's experience of the garden. It can break up a large area that overwhelms and reveal hidden treasures in the garden at every turn. A walkway may lead from a terrace to a gazebo or an arbored retreat within the garden. In a small garden, the walkway provides a path to protect fragile ground covers and flowerbeds while allowing easy access for tending or picking vegetables and flowers. A stepping-stone walkway combines convenience and a natural look and is durable when properly installed.
Cottage gardens had their beginnings as budget gardens created in free-form style around the humble thatched cottages of Tudor England. Gardens were planted with "pass-along" flowers, vegetables and shrubs that could be easily shared with friends and neighbors. Budget cottage-style gardens were always created from the hardy perennials we associate with the cottage garden style today. Foxgloves, hollyhocks, roses, iris and daisies are inexpensive perennial plants that are the backbone of the cottage style.
Cottage gardens filled the little patches that lined streets of industrial towns in front of working class homes in 19th-century England. They held a jumble of vegetables, herbs and a few perennial flowers for the kitchen and family table, saving money and making life a bit less grim. The form was expanded into the English border by Gertrude Jekyll as a rebellion against the stiff formality of Victorian gardens.
Creating a walkway through the garden or yard allows homeowner's to wander through the landscape. When creating walkways, plant selection is important. Many plants do not withstand foot traffic, making them ill suited for use among a staggered stone walkway. For laid paver pathways, create definition by choosing flowering or green plants bordering the walkways, bringing the garden to the edge of the space.
The cottage garden concept is pulled from the 500-year-old history of English cottages that were surrounded by a wild array of scented flowers, herbs and vegetables to sustain the family, sell at the market or provide medicinal benefits. The best perennials for your cottage garden may be those plants that are available in your area and meet your landscape design for height and color.
If a charming English cottage garden is part of the vision for your home, map out your design to take full advantage of the landscape concept. Initially, this style of garden developed in plots of dirt surrounding the simple cottages of poor workers on the large estates in Tudor England. Over the centuries, the garden style blossomed beyond a way to supplement meager food rations into a haven for fruit, flowers and foliage. Today's cottage gardens integrate edible landscaping with abundant flowers and quiet areas for relaxation.
The beauty of an old-fashioned cottage garden can lend an Old World feel to your landscape. Cottage gardens are designed to be a riot of color and texture, with very little space between the plants. Traditional cottage gardens included fruit trees, vegetables and a mix of flowers, many modern cottage gardens comprise flowers alone. To create your own cottage garden, start with a mix of traditional favorites.
A cottage garden evokes a sense of whimsy, as it's comprised of sprawling paths, informal seating areas and seemingly haphazard plantings. Since these gardens are so carefree, they are fairly easy to plant and following some simple tips will help you create a cottage garden that will provide you with years of enjoyment.
Cottage gardens are defined by their lack of definition. Instead of straight, ordered rows, flowers grow in colorful, informal profusion. A variety of heights, species and colors contribute to the effect. Based on traditional English country gardens, cottage gardens are usually planted around a front or back door and include a mix of annuals, perennials, roses, bulbs, shrubs and flowering vines. Though cottage gardens may resemble a haphazard explosion of plants, they actually require careful planning and maintenance.
The English cottage garden design is adaptible to different home types, growing zones and personal taste. Cottage garden is all about utilizing space in the garden for a purposeful hodgepodge of color, texture and size. Consider working plants native to your area in as much as possible, as these plants tend to use less water and nutrients and provide shelter and food for wildlife. While your options are broad, there are a few plants that are considered must-haves in the cottage garden.
A cottage garden includes flowers, herbs, vegetables and other small plants surrounding a small house, or cottage. This style of garden is informal and uses mass plantings; it has informal lines and pathways. The term "cottage garden" evokes images of quaint Victorian-era homes or rustic cottages in an English countryside. Cottage gardens are known for their charming style and use of simple, hardy plants, according to the Texas A&M AgriLIFE Extension website
Cottage-style gardens evoke images of quaint English gardens surrounding thatched cottages, or of old rural homes in the Deep South. Cottage gardens are typically small, densely packed areas bursting with plants and flowers of various colors, shapes and sizes. According to Texas A&M Extension, cottage gardens should contain a diverse sampling of plants including annuals, perennials, small trees and shrubs. The U.S. Department of Agriculture plant hardiness zone 8 is defined by a minimum annual temperature of 10 to 20 degrees F and stretches along the southern edge of the United States from Texas to Florida.
The Colorado State University Cooperative Extension suggests that cottage gardens started in England in the 16th century with farm laborers and tenants cultivating small areas of land near their homes to grow flowers, herbs and vegetables. Today, cottage gardening is synonymous with informal, even tangled, displays of colorful flowers and shrubs. Emulate this look in almost any garden with the right choice of plants.
The English style cottage garden design is one that grew out of necessity. With a focus on using every available space to grow food and flowers, the early English created a style that is one of controlled chaos—a beautiful mess of flowers, shrubs, trees, vegetables and accessories that is one of the most popular design choices of today. There is no right way to design an English garden, but there are some design elements that are considered necessity to the style. Adapting the style to fit your personal taste, home style, sunlight and growing requirements is all a matter of…
Cottage gardens create an atmosphere of tranquility and peace in your home landscaping. Decorating cottage gardens involves careful planning with the purpose of making the garden look unplanned and carefree, as if it appeared there naturally. Cottage gardens are meant to add a relaxing respite from daily life to your home.
Plants native to Tasmania, Australia's only island state, are especially attractive when planted in a cottage garden style. The style calls for crowded plantings of many perennial plant selections. Incorporate native specimens of ornamental shrubs, flowers and edible herbs.
A cottage garden is a specialized type of plant bed traditionally built around the foundation of a house. These gardens mix flowers and edible plants to make full use of a small growing space and create a garden that is both beautiful and practical. English peasants developed cottage gardens during the Renaissance period in the 14th and 15th centuries, mixing "passalong plants" - flowers easily propagated and shared among friends - with fruits, vegetables and herbs in a space conveniently surrounding their homes. The modern definition of the cottage garden is somewhat less structured and refers to any small garden…
A walkway can lend ambiance and a bit of visual interest to any garden. It can define different areas in the garden or lead to a focal point like a seating area, reflecting pool or pergola. Cottage garden walkways can be made from a variety of materials that are easy accessible at any local garden center. No special skills are needed to create a simple walkway, but it will take a bit of strength and stamina.
Roses, and specifically English roses, are a mainstay of the classic cottage garden, which is known for its seemingly random and carefree design. Establishing a successful cottage garden greatly depends on creating an informal atmosphere through an abundant and tightly planted mixture of roses, herbs, and various flowering annuals and perennials. Successfully growing roses in the cottage garden setting requires correct plant selection, proper site location, good soil preparation, attention to feeding and pest control, and pruning.
Historically, cottage gardens were built by farmers or estate workers who had little plots of land for their own use; they planted gardens packed with vegetables, herbs and some flowers. Today, cottage gardens are built to cover all of the yard or they can be garden areas interspersed with lawn for the children and pets. The overall feel of a cottage garden is casual rather than formal, with a variety of plantings of all shapes and colors, interspersed with interesting 'eye-catchers' and shaded seating areas.
Every cottage garden is unique to its gardener, but all have some things in common. A cottage garden, though small, is chockfull of a mixture of planting materials, including annuals, perennials, biennials, shrubs, vines and even herbs, vegetables and fruit trees. Cottage gardens historically were intended to be useful as well as beautiful. Such a garden is not intended to impress the viewer from afar, but to charm anyone who steps inside.
If you've got a small yard in which you'd like to design an enclosed cottage garden, nearly anything goes, because cottage gardens are casual and supposed to look unplanned and natural. Follow these guidelines and include what you like; there are no hard and fast rules, except perhaps a casual feeling and appearance.
A cottage garden (or a country garden) may seem simple to plan, with its informal mixture of flowers and plants. However, it takes a lot of planning to create a charming, graceful garden that looks as though it were part of an English home a century or more ago.
The English cottage garden is filled with a profusion of flowers. Arbors draped with fragrant roses or clematis direct your eye to a pathway with low growing flowers reaching out, brushing your ankles as you stroll by. A bench appears ahead, partially hidden amongst tall flowers, providing a reclusive location for relaxing cup of tea. Try your hand at an English cottage garden landscape design by starting with small vignettes.
Cottage gardens hail from the small plots the peasants of the Tudor period in England planted around their small homes. In these early gardens the emphasis was on vegetables and herbs, but also included were some hardy florals that have come to be recognized as traditional cottage garden plants. At first glance, this type of garden appears wild with no apparent design but, in truth, cottage gardens are based on very specific plans.
Cottage gardens were once a common sight behind each home right next to the kitchen garden. They provided cut flowers for the dinner table and parlor from early spring until the first hard freeze. Like their name suggests, cottage gardens make the most of a small space. Large, professionally landscaped yards and the availability of store-bought flowers just about did in the art of the old-fashioned cottage garden, but a re-discovery of the joys of gardening has brought back the idea of planting what you like in a corner or side of the yard to enjoy and harvest whenever you…
Cottage style is a popular trend in home decorating. Have you considered that you could add cottage style to your outdoor space and garden? From architectural to landscaping elements, you can add inexpensive touches to give a charming cottage style to any outdoor space.
The cottage-style garden is a cozy, tightly packed array of plants, flowers, shrubs and trees. Ideal for small spaces, a cottage garden requires some effort getting established, but it's easy to maintain it once the plants have matured. Because of the tightly packed spacings, weeds are not as large a problem as with other types of gardens.
