Cottage Garden Design

A visual look at a quick and easy way to make a low-maintenance cottage garden, plant and colour ideas, not much chat and a reminder that it will be sunny again one day!

Here are some of the stars of my garden!

With such crummy, wet, February weather I like to look back over garden photographs, as I plan which plants I need to move and where gaps will be for annuals. I adopt the chaos garden theory where everything is allowed to do as it pleases, with just a little help from me with organic pest control, weeding and watering. I leave a lot of seed pods to mature so they self-seed, plus birds help to spread Lupin and Snapdragon seeds. As soon as it dries a little and we get an outdoor day, I will it is the right time to move anything growing in the wrong place.

I divide my flower beds into warm, cool and paintbox colours, simplifying the overall look of the garden.

Warm includes red, orange, yellow, maroon and cerise

Cool includes purples, silver, lilac, apricot and pink

Paintbox beds have equal amounts of each true colour

I like to plant pots from seeds, grown in the greenhouse to fill in any empty spaces.

This pot is brimming with Snapdragon, Clary, Linaria, Geranium and Phlox.

I have very narrow, curving paths between my flower beds, so from a distance, the garden looks like a bank of flowers

Many flowers are important for a cottage garden

Lupins, Delphiniums, Roses and Honeysuckles all being vital.

Sometimes the birds sow seeds for me. These huge, lilac pom pom poppies appeared in a Lilac, Lavender and Rosemary bed with a dusty pink rose in the background, and with self-seeding flowers like Nigella and Sweet Williams, each year is a wonderful surprise

By the back end of summer, my garden is mainly hot colours, orange, yellow and red with a full collection of sunflowers in yellows, ruby and chocolate colours, many usually over 12 feet tall!

This garden is fabulous when I put the effort in, keeping it all tidy and trim. I cannot wait for it all to start blooming whilst enjoying long, sultry evenings reading a good book, after the warmth of the day, sipping a homemade fizzy raspberry cordial. Perfick!

On a final note, here are some of the special souls that visit our garden each year. Besides the many bees, dragonflies and butterflies, we also have two pairs of nesting robins, a huge family of wrens and many blackbirds. Here is a photo of Grandpa Blackbird from a few years ago. With spending so much time in the garden, Grandpa introduced his daughter to us (middle photo), and she became so tame she would sit with us if we were sat out. She then brought her daughter to us, the last picture. It was a marvellous experience to be accepted by these blackbirds!