How to Grow an English Cottage Garden (When You Don't Live in England)
The English cottage garden; romantic, rambling, floral and wild. Pastel blooms intermingling with fragrant herbs and leafy vegetables. Roses climbing up archways. Blossoms falling from crabapple trees in the soft breeze while some sexually frustrated Jane Austin dame in a high-necked dress and uncomfortable boots pulls potatoes from the ground wishing she had voting rights and didn’t have to cook dinner or marry the town’s only weirdo bachelor.
I guess historically it’s been a bit of a mixed bag.
The good news, though, is it’s 2021 and we really can have it all (provided we maintain good hand washing habits and adhere to social distancing requirements). We can have our climbing roses and eat our emancipation too! And what’s more, we can live in a sweltering, dry, harsh Australian climate and STILL revel in the joys of growing a cottage garden! Don’t believe me? Read on.
But first!
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A brief history of the cottage garden
Cottage gardens didn’t actually begin as an intentional style. Originally, they were practical spaces for growing fruits, vegetables and herbs. In fact, some cottage gardens allegedly grew nothing but potatoes. These early cottage gardens were planted by working class people, often middle-ranking servants of English royal or noble households. They were spaces primarily used to raise animals for meat, bees for honey and herbs for medicine.
There is some debate about when The Cottage Garden became a specific style of gardening, although it seems at some point the wealthier ‘leisured’ class noticed what had been planted under their noses in the back alleys of their estates and decided to make it a ‘style’. The beautiful-yet-informal style of the cottage garden has roots in the Arts and Crafts movement of the 19th century and was, in part, a response to the hoighty-toighty formal gardens that were typically planted by the elite at the time. Instead of perfectly trimmed lawns and snobbish hedgerows, the cottage style espoused overflowing borders, rambling climbers and a general intermixing of edibles with ornamentals.
The idea of an informal planting style seems to go in and out of fashion. As does the idea of gardening for food and practicality. The 1990s gardens I remember from my childhood were certainly not cottage gardens. Spiky drought-tolerant agaves, bloody mondo grass everywhere, some parched palms and uniformly sad-looking Moses-in-the-cradle plants in every border.
This is Moses-in-the-cradle and while I theoretically believe that all plants are beautiful I would burn this overused beast to the ground.
So I guess it’s not altogether surprising that a lot of people I speak to assume that cottage gardens just ‘can’t be done’ in Australia. We tend to think that our climate dictates planting spiky monocultures of drought-resistant plants in styles that are antithetical to the cascading flowers and soft borders of the English cottage garden.
Fortunately that’s not remotely true!
The Australian Cottage Garden - it’s a thing!
There are two things to know about growing cottage gardens in Australia.
First, plenty of plants that work in English cottage gardens will work just fine here as long as we provide them with good soil and enough water during summer. Check out my list of traditional cottage garden plants that work in Australia (below) to see what plants grow well in our climate.
Second, you don’t actually have to grow traditional English plants to have a rambling, sprawling and very beautiful cottage style garden. And there are many gorgeous native Australian, South African and mediterranean plants that are well-suited to our climate and will give your garden a beautiful cottage garden style. Take a look at my list of non-traditional cottage garden plants (also below) for some ideas of what will work well.
To be honest, I don’t even think you have to limit yourselves to plants that look ‘cottagey’. Apparently my garden looks like a cottage garden but it’s filled with a pretty eclectic assortment of plants, from banana and mango trees to aloes and sweet peas. Maybe our first mistake is thinking we need to be beholden to any kind of planting style in the first place. My rule is: if something lives happily in my garden it is very welcome no matter where it comes from or what ‘style’ it supposedly fits. Apart from Moses-in-the-cradle. And Mondo grass.
Frothy fennel, lettuce flowers, daisies, nemesia, kalanchoe, calendula and primroses (among other things)
Traditional plants that work
This is by no means an exhaustive list and I’m sure that there are many more traditional cottage garden plants that will also work in an Australian climate. These are just the ones I can vouch for because they’ve worked for me.
Edibles
Potatoes (I plant mine in a big pot so I don’t lose them in the garden beds), dwarf fruit trees (apples, pears), root vegetables (carrots, radishes, turnips, beetroot), gooseberries, raspberries, fennel, lettuce, silverbeet, kale, brassicas (broccoli, cauliflower, rocket, mustard greens) - in fact, I haven’t come across many vegetables that don’t work in Perth’s climate provided they get adequate water in summer.
Purple Dragon carrots and Thumbelina carrots
Red-stemmed silverbeet
Broccoli blossoms
Red-centred apple
Red-centred apple blossoms
Herbs
Herbs are a classic part of the English cottage garden (and, if you let them flower, are fantastic for attracting pollinators and beneficial insects). Try parsley, rosemary, thyme, oregano, tarragon, marjoram, coriander, dill, tansy (not edible), wormwood, chamomile and lavender.
Ornamentals
Phew this could be a huge list (fun!) so I’ll just name my favourites. Calendula and borage (edible flowers) violets, pansies, stocks, primroses, hollyhocks, carnations, tulips, crocuses, daffodils, foxgloves, delphiniums, daisies, evening primroses, wisteria, aquilegias, poppies, elderflowers, clematis (works fine in Australia provided you give it a shady position for its roots and a climbing frame for it to grow towards sunlight), roses and sweet alyssum.
Sweet peas
Orange calendula and purple borage
Non-traditional plants that work
While these aren’t considered traditional English cottage garden plants, you’d never know it to look at them: ribbon bush, giant blue African salvia, sage and all ornamental salvias (which are actually native to Mexico), geraniums, pelargoniums and society garlic (all of which originated in South Africa), rosemary, Dusty Miller and bay trees (which all hail from the Mediterranean), cistus (which is native to the Mediterranean, Morocco, Portugal and regions of the middle east - this is a great cascading bush that is covered in delicate flowers in springtime and loves our dry climate), Nemesia (also from South Africa), cosmos and marigolds (native to Mexico and Guatemala), Verbena bonariensis (native to South America) saltbush (a gorgeous native Australian plant with silvery-grey edible leaves), Bidens (thought to originate in South America) and jasmine (which originated in the Himalayas). Phew, I have to admit that was quite a fun ten minutes Googling where everything comes from!
To be fair, if you go back far enough many of the ‘traditional’ English cottage garden plants don’t have English origins either. After all, apples originated in Kazakhstan and pears came from China! We live in a glorious melting pot of shared plants, intermingling cultures, traded crafts and accumulated hybridised knowledge. Which is something that makes our species infinitely creative, relentlessly interesting and, in my humble opinion, reflects a beautiful part of our common humanity.
A blue salvia
A cistus dropping light pink blossoms
A pink cosmos flower
Plants that don’t work
You’ll have more trouble growing these plants in an Australian climate because they either don’t enjoy our hot, dry weather, or they don’t enjoy the sandy soil: peonies (they need a real winter chill), lupins (these SHOULD grow just fine but I have never once had any luck with them), hollyhocks (I know I also put these in the category of ‘plants that work’ but I wanted to make a quick mention here that they are susceptible to ‘rust’, a fungal disease borne out of hot weather and high humidity - it’s not a big deal, I grow them anyway, but they do better for me when I make sure not to overwater them).
I have now got to the point in this article where I am putting effort into finding plants that don’t work, which I think is both a very good thing and a clear indication that cottage gardens don’t need a limited geographic distribution whatsoever!
Now you have a reasonably comprehensive list of plants to get your cottage garden started. Before I leave you, I am going to fire at you some quick final recommendations for your planting style. It’s not only about the plants, after all - it also matters how you arrange them!
Digiplexis - a hybrid cross between a foxglove (Digitalis purpurea) & Canary Island foxglove (Isoplexis canariensis).
A red pelargonium
Styling tricks
There are a few basic features of a cottage garden layout that, once incorporated into your garden, will really help achieve a cottage-y style. I have used the word ‘rambling’ several times in this post, but I will use it one last time - you want to have a garden with a rambling feeling. This means:
Winding paths, whose destination is obscured by plants and trees - paths that disappear into the garden create a sense of mystery, of wilderness and a kind of unbridled beauty. Aim to build several into your garden
Borders that overflow with (slightly) unkempt flowers - plant things like bidens, sweet alyssum and daisies right up close to the edges of your garden beds. As they flower and bloom the flowers will spill out onto your paths, helping to soften the paths and giving the garden a kinda loose, tumbling floral feeling.
Semi-chaotic beauty - this one is trickier to perfect. You want a garden that looks wild and unmanaged, but in truth these gardens are always managed. Without a bit of thought and care it’s easy to accidentally plant a cottage garden that really just looks messy and busy. The trick is to:
1) Use repeat plantings - repeat the same plants throughout the garden to help tie different areas together and give the garden a feeling of consistency - Breadseed poppies do this every spring in my garden, popping up in the unfilled spots and adding a pink mist to every bed.
2) Plant clumps of plants rather than individual plants - individual plants can look ‘bitty’ and messy, but if you plant a clump of the same plant suddenly it makes a big impact that is very pretty to look at.
3) Add points of structure in the garden - use edging around your garden beds, add bird baths, pots and arches - these help to add a more solid structure to parts of your garden which plays nicely against the softer flowing plants. It also helps to add height.
4) Repeat colours throughout the garden - like repeating the same plant through the garden, repeating colours helps to tie the whole thing together
5) If the garden feels chaotic, try to plant fewer different species of plants while you learn your way around the planting style - having one of every species of plant is fun (I should know, I am ALWAYS buying random new plants) but it can be hard to fit them in without creating a chaotic feel. If in doubt, repeat what works and add new singular stuff in more gradually.
And that about wraps it up for today!
I hope I’ve given you a bit of courage and motivation to grow your own cottage garden. I may be biased but I think cottage gardens are some of the most beautiful gardens in the world. Grow a cottage garden and you’ll never run out of things to uncover and discover. They’re fabulous for attracting wildlife, they can feed you, provide you with fragrant flowers and herbs and, more than that, I think they appeal to something deep and childlike in us. The fairy gardens that we always wanted to immerse ourselves in as children. Filled with secret corners, hiding spots and a world of insects. And, again, very few instances of mondo grass.