In 2013 we decided to transform the vegetable garden into a cottage garden. With its formality it is, 'old' perhaps, more like a potager. Perhaps I should call it the Cotager or Pottage Garden? But, by any name, the jumble of decorative and edible plants is absolutely true to the very British tradition of the cottage garden.
Cottage gardens evolved around the homes of the rural poor, living in tied cottages with scraps of land where they could supplement their diets by growing some vegetables. Occasionally a flower was allowed to enter into this utilitarian mix, which clearly illustrates that you cannot bury the human spirit.
What has filtered down into gardening culture, however, is something more carefree; a loose, informal style of gardening identified with rural charm and a sense of harmonious abandonment. Added to this is playfulness with topiary. I am not quite sure when topiary - not neat cones and balls but the large, fanciful yew topiary that one still joyfully sees incorporated into cottage hedges - was taken up in cottages, but it expresses a freedom of spirit and pride that I love. My Irish yews nod in that direction.
What is certainly true to the original cottage gardens is the absence of lawn. Every square inch was traditionally devoted to growing something that was either edible or beautiful. Lawns implied leisure and of that there was none other than exhausted sleep. Cottage life may have been simple and even unstressful by modern standards but it was never less than hard.
There is obviously no need to reproduce that now. A thatched cottage with a profusion of flower interspersed with vegetables and fruit is what we can take from history rather than tight-lipped moralising. But it's worth remembering that the core of such a garden is edible rather than floral.
Organic evolution
This story is from the June 2023 edition of BBC Gardeners World.
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This story is from the June 2023 edition of BBC Gardeners World.
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