Cottage garden

The Cottage garden is a distinct style of garden that uses an informal design, traditional materials, dense plantings, and a mixture of ornamental and edible plants on a smaller scale than large estate and public gardens. Cottage gardens go back many centuries, but their popularity grew in 1870s England in response to the more structured English estate gardens that used formal designs and massed colours of brilliant greenhouse annuals. They are more casual by design, depending on grace and charm rather than grandeur and formal structure.

The earliest cottage gardens were far more practical than their modern descendants—with an emphasis on vegetables and herbs, along with some fruit trees, perhaps a beehive, and even livestock. Flowers were used to fill any spaces in between. Over time, flowers became more dominant. Modern day cottage gardens include countless regional and personal variations of the more traditional English cottage garden.

History and evolution

Origins

One version of the origin of cottage gardens is that they arose out of the Black Death of the 1340s, when the death of so many laborers made land available for small cottages with personal gardens. According to the late nineteenth-century legend of origin, these gardens were originally created by the workers that lived in the cottages of the villages, to provide them with food and herbs, with flowers planted in for decoration. Helen Leach analysed the historical origins of the romanticized "cottage garden" in Cultivating Myths: Fiction, Fact and Fashion in Garden History (Auckland: Godwit, 2000) subjecting the garden style to rigorous historical analysis, along with the ornamental potager and the herb garden. She claimed their origins were less in workingmen's actual gardens in the nineteenth century and more in the leisured classes' discovery of simple hardy plants, in part through the writings of John Claudius Loudon. Loudon helped to design the estate at Great Tew, Oxfordshire, where farm workers were provided with cottages that had architectural quality set in a small garden—about an acre—where they could grow food and keep pigs and chickens.

Evolution

Alexander Pope was an early proponent of less formal gardens, calling in a 1713 article in The Guardian for gardens with the "amiable simplicity of unadorned nature". Other writers in the 18th century who encouraged less formal, and more natural, gardens included Joseph Addison and Lord Shaftesbury. The evolution of cottage gardens can be followed in the issues of The Cottage Gardener 1848-61, edited by George William Johnson, where the emphasis is squarely on the "florist's flowers", carnations and auriculas in fancy varieties that were originally cultivated as a highly-competitive blue-collar hobby.

William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll helped to popularize the idea of less formal gardens in their many books and magazine articles. Robinson's The Wild Garden, published in 1870, contained in the first edition an essay on "The Garden of British Wild Flowers", which was eliminated from later editions. In his The English Flower Garden, illustrated with cottage gardens from Somerset, Kent and Surrey, he remarked, "One lesson of these little gardens, that are so pretty, is that one can get good effects from simple materials." From the 1890s his lifelong friend Jekyll applied cottage garden plantings to more structured designs in even quite large country houses, and her Colour in the Flower Garden of 1908 has been reprinted as the cottage gardener's bible.

Robinson and Jekyll were part of the Arts and Crafts Movement, a broader movement in art, architecture, and crafts during the late 1800s which included a return to the informal planting style derived from the Romantic tradition of the English cottage garden. The Arts and Crafts Exhibition of 1888 began a movement toward an idealized natural country garden style. The garden designs of Robinson and Jekyll were often associated with Arts and Crafts style houses. Both were influenced by William Morris, one of the leaders of the Arts and Crafts Movement—Robinson quoted Morris's views condemning carpet bedding; Jekyll shared Morris's mystical view of nature and drew on the floral designs in his textiles for her gardening style. When Morris built his Red House in Kent, it influenced new ideas in architecture and gardening—the "old-fashioned" garden suddenly became a fashion accessory among the British artistic middle class, and the cottage garden esthetic began to emigrate to America.

Modern cottage gardens

In the early twentieth century, however, the term "cottage garden" might be applied even to as large and sophisticated a garden as Hidcote Manor, which Vita Sackville-West described as "a cottage garden on the most glorified scale but where the colour harmonies were carefully contrived and controlled, as in the famous "Red Borders". Vita Sackville-West had taken similar models for her own "cottage garden", one of many "garden rooms" at Sissinghurst Castle; her own idea of a "cottage garden" was as a place where "the plants grow in a jumble, flowering shrubs mingled with Roses, herbaceous plants with bulbous subjects, climbers scrambling over hedges, seedlings coming up wherever they have chosen to sow themselves". The cottage garden was also promoted by artists such as Helen Allingham.

The cottage garden in France is a development of the early twentieth century. Monet's garden at Giverny is a prominent example, a sprawling garden full of varied plantings, rich colors, and water gardens. In modern times, the term 'cottage garden' is used to describe any number of informal garden styles, using design and plants that are far from the traditional English cottage garden origins. Examples include regional variations using a grass prairie scheme (in the American midwest) and California chapparal cottage gardens.

Plants and practices

The earliest cottage gardens would have included a beehive and livestock, and frequently a pig and sty, along with a well. The peasant cottager of medieval times was more interested in meat than flowers, with herbs grown for medicinal use rather than for their beauty. By Elizabethan times there was more prosperity, and thus more room to grow flowers. Even the early cottage garden flowers often had their practical use—violets for spreading on the floor (for their pleasant scent and keeping out vermin); calendula and primroses, which were both attractive and used in cooking. Others, such as sweet william and hollyhocks were grown entirely for their beauty.

Over time, plants common in the traditional cottage garden included climbing plants, especially rose and honeysuckle, and hedging plants that included hawthorn, holly, and privet. Flowers with a long cottage garden history include hollyhocks, carnations, sweet williams, marguerites, marigolds, lilies, peonies, tulips, crocus, daisies, foxglove, violets, pansies, monkshood, lavender, campanulas, mignonette, Solomon's seal, evening primrose, stocks, lily-of-the-valley, primrose, cowslips, and many varieties of roses. Fruit trees would have included an apple and a pear, for cider and perry, gooseberries and raspberries. The method of planting closely packed plants was supposed to reduce the amount of weeding and watering required, but planted stone pathways or turf paths, and clipped hedges overgrown with wayward vines, are "cottage garden" features requiring well-timed maintenance.

Today, a cottage garden is often primarily flowers and herbs, with a casual looking design. Many gardeners attempt to use heirloom or 'old-fashioned' plants and varieties in their cottage gardens to preserve the antique flavour of the style—even though these may not have been authentic or traditional cottage garden plants. Paths, arbors, and fences also use traditional or antique looking materials. Wooden fences and gates, paths covered with locally made bricks or stone, and arbors using natural materials all give a more casual—and less formal—look and feel to a cottage garden.

See also

• Heirloom gardening
• Herb garden
• Potager garden
• Residential garden
• Square foot gardening

Notes

References

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• Horwood, Catherine Potted History: The Story of Plants in the Home. frances lincoln ltd.
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• Reynolds, Myra The Treatment of Nature in English Poetry Between Pope and Wordsworth. The University of Chicago press.
• Sackville-West, "Hidcote Manor", Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society 74 (1949:476-81), noted by Brent Elliott, "Historical Revivalism in the Twentieth Century: A Brief Introduction" Garden History 28.1, Reviewing the Twentieth-Century Landscape (Summer 2000:17-31)
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