Cottage garden planting

Chocolate box style

Historically, cottage gardens developed when people realised adding flowers to their vegetable plots would help attract bees to pollinate their crops. This evolved into the traditional cottage garden style with deep borders, a vibrant mix of perfumed flowers and herbs, a meandering path and a rustic bench tucked in a quiet corner.

Recreate this look in your garden with features such as an informal gravel path edged with lavender or a willow arch supporting a vigorous Rosa multiflora 'Rambling Rector'. Use a colourful mixture of bulbs, perennials and flowering shrubs to ensure a long display of colour. The profusion of flowers will also attract bees, butterflies and moths to your garden.

Planting principles

Cottage garden plants are grown very close together and are meant to look as if they were put together at random, without any real plan behind them.

In practice it takes planning to create a garden that looks entirely natural. Use all available space, squeezing in ground cover plants such as Campanula carpatica and add height with climbing clematis or honeysuckle. There are several ways you can arrange plants in your border, including:

• Drifts make very natural-looking beds. Informal teardrop shapes work best. If you have uneven ground simply outline the high or low lying contours and use those shapes for your drifts.
• Random planting is typical of old-fashioned cottage gardens, where annuals were left to self-seed between more-vigorous spreading perennials. Be careful as the result can either look very natural or a complete mess.
• Group plants by height, colour, texture or plant type. The usual arrangement is to put the tallest plants at the back and shortest ones at the front, so you can see everything. But why not have the odd island of taller plants in a carpet of shorter flowers so you have to look round them?

Pathside planting

Cottage gardens are full of detail and a good way to add interest is by edging a path with a row of plants. Repeating the same plant at regular intervals along a pathside can add a sense of order to the apparently chaotic planting. There are many different plants you can use, including:

• Box balls, being evergreen, give the garden year-round structure. Plant them at the edge of a border or grow them in terracotta ‘long tom’ flowerpots and stand them in position. Clipped balls of about 45cm (18in) in diameter should be spaced up to 2 meters apart for impact. Balls planted too close together lose the 'topiary' effect and are difficult to trim. For a solid edge use a row of clipped dwarf box edging instead.
• Lavender creates a fragrant, evergreen, dwarf hedge which can be upright and clipped or allowed to spill gently over the path for a more romantic effect, depending on the variety you choose. Plant 30cm (1ft) apart and trim lightly each year in late summer once the flowers have faded, to stop plants from becoming woody.
• Forsythia makes a solid, late spring-flowering hedge that grows just tall enough to stop you seeing over the top, so it's good for dividing the garden into smaller 'rooms'. Plant roughly 60-90cm (2-3ft) apart, to form a formal, clipped, flowering hedge that suits a cottage garden perfectly. Cut an occasional arch or peephole so you can see through into the next area of the garden. Trim into conical shapes after flowering each year to keep them looking tidy.

Plants to try

Cottage garden favourites

• Allium hollandicum ‘Purple Sensation’
• Rosa multiflora 'Rambling Rector'
• Rudbeckia fulgida var. sullivantii ‘Goldsturm’
• Geranium ‘Johnson’s Blue’
• Achillea ‘Coronation Gold’

Scented options

• Lonicera periclymenum
• Rosmarinus officinalis
• Lavandula angustifolia 'Hidcote'
• Philadelphus 'Belle Etoile'
• Syringa vulgaris 'Madame Lemoine'