Cottage Garden Designs

Traditional cottage garden designs were set up to provide fruits, vegetables, and herbs as food for the family with flowers added in to the garden for decoration.

As lifestyles changed over the years, these garden designs took on a new more random and carefree form and planting style.

Cottage gardens now are more typically designed and profusely planted with flowers.

Many gardeners attempt to use heirloom varieties of plants in their designs such as delphinium, hollyhocks, and pansies and combine them with some of the other simple flowers, such as daisies.

To preserve some of the antique flavor of the garden's old style you can include annuals, perennials, small shrubs (deciduous and evergreen), vines, and small trees - especially fruiting ones. Include a rose arbor and some flowering herbs, also.

More and more, though, cottage gardens are primarily made up of flowers.

Some gardeners will add a little accent by including a sun-dial, paved pathways, or garden seating, also.

All of these accents were generally missing from a genuine cottage garden as they were unnecessary and a waste of valuable food planting space.

Cottage Garden Plants

Aquilegia - Columbine
Clematis - vine
Delphinium
Dianthus - Sweet William
Geranium
Hollyhock
Honeysuckle - vine
Iris

Lavender
Mock Orange - shrub
Pansy
Potentilla
Rosa
Rudbeckia - Black Eyed Susan
Spirea - shrub
Tulip

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