Cottage garden

The earliest cottage gardens were more practical than today's, with emphasis on vegetables and herbs, fruit trees, perhaps a beehive, and even livestock.

Cottage gardens, which emerged in Elizabethan times, appear to have originated as a local source for herbs and fruits.

She concluded that their origins were less in workingmen's gardens in the 19th century and more in the leisured classes' discovery of simple hardy plants, in part through the writings of John Claudius Loudon.

[4] Loudon helped to design the estate at Great Tew, Oxfordshire, where farm workers were provided with cottages that had architectural quality set in a smallholding or large garden—about an acre—where they could grow food and keep pigs and chickens.

The peasant cottager of medieval times was more interested in meat than flowers, with herbs grown for medicinal use and cooking, rather than for their beauty.

Even the early cottage garden flowers typically had their practical use—violets were spread on the floor (for their pleasant scent and keeping out vermin); calendulas and primroses were both attractive and used in cooking.

"[10] From the 1890s his lifelong friend Jekyll applied cottage garden principles to more structured designs in even quite large country houses.

Examples include regional variations using a grass prairie scheme (in the American midwest) and California chaparral cottage gardens.

[21][22] The cottage garden design is based more on principles than formulae: it has an informal look, with a seemingly casual mixture of flowers, herbs, and vegetables often packed into a small area.

But some features, such as planted stone paths, turf pathways, or clipped hedges overgrown with wayward vines, still need well-timed maintenance.

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.

[26] Pots, ornaments, and furniture also use natural looking materials with traditional finishes—everything is chosen to give the impression of an old-fashioned country garden.

Cultivated forms of this grow 4 to 6 ft or higher, with gently arching canes that help give an informal look to a garden.

These very fragrant shrub roses grow 5 ft tall and wide, with a floppy habit that is aided by training on an arch or pillar.

[35] Climbing plants in the traditional cottage garden included European honeysuckle (Lonicera periclymenum) and Traveller's Joy (Clematis vitalba).

The modern cottage garden includes many Clematis hybrids that have the old appeal, with sparse foliage that allows them to grow through roses and trees, and along fences and arbors.

[37] In the traditional cottage garden, hedges served as fences on the perimeter to keep out marauding livestock and for privacy, along with other practical uses.

The fast-growing Elderberry, in addition to creating a hedge, provided berries for food and wine, with the flowers being fried in batter or made into lotions and ointments.

Over time, more ornamental and less utilitarian plants became popular cottage garden hedges, including laurel, lilac, snowberry, japonica, and others.

[29] Perennials were the largest group of traditional cottage garden flowers[36]—those with a long cottage garden history include hollyhocks, carnations, sweet williams, marguerites, marigolds, lilies, peonies, tulips, crocus, daisies, foxglove, monkshood, lavender, campanulas, Solomon's seal, evening primrose, lily-of-the-valley, primrose, cowslips, and many varieties of roses.

[40] Traditional cottage garden herbs included sage, thyme, southernwood, wormwood, catmint, feverfew, lungwort, soapwort, hyssop, sweet woodruff, and lavender.

[41][42] Fruit in the traditional cottage garden would have included an apple and a pear, for cider and perry,[43] gooseberries and raspberries.