Week 9 > You are reading Week 10 - March 6th, 2023 > Week 11

Old Fashioned Charm

Heirloom plants are essential to the cottage garden style: they bring a nostalgic feeling to the landscape, childhood memories, a sense of enchantment.

If you're drawn to this design, old garden roses are a must - bourbons, damasks, albas, centifolias, preferably fragrant and perpetual blooming, something like Gertrude Jekyll, Louise Odier, Fragrant Cloud or New Dawn.

Adding old-fashioned favorites like peonies, bleeding hearts, sweet violets, columbines and beardtongue for spring, delphiniums, yarrow, phlox, daisies, coreopsis, hollyhocks and foxgloves for summer, sedum, verbena, asters, and hardy mums for fall, and hellebores, mahonia and cyclamens for winter, will ensure you have something blooming in the garden throughout the year.

As groups of perennials come in and out of season, you can fill the gaps in bloom with classic cottage garden annuals like heliotrope, verbena, sweet peas, nasturtiums, cosmos, zinnias, cornflowers, Sweet William and marigolds.

Don't forget to plant bulbs, daffodils, hyacinths, tulips, lilies and irises, and fragrant climbers like jasmine, honeysuckle and clematis, to complete the picture.

A Lovely Mess

Given enough time, any thriving cottage garden turns messy, and what a lovely mess that is, a wild paradise of color and fragrance, swarmed by bees and butterflies.

The charm of a cottage garden rests in its apparent randomness where mass plantings create blocks of color, self-effacing plants draw you near with their fragrance, and otherwise well-behaved annuals spring unexpected surprises.

Cottage gardens are self-sustaining habitats, where plants negotiate their share of soil and sunshine and come to a natural equilibrium.

Formosa lilies and gangly snapdragons trail under foliage and weave through thickets of daisies and coreopsis, while creeping phlox spills over retaining walls and wave petunias engulf hanging baskets.

Overgrown sage and exuberant daylilies provide cheerful backdrops for the seven foot tall blue delphiniums, which sway proudly in the breeze in the company of fuzzy liatris, lacy cosmos and love-in-a-mist.

Ferns bring texture to the shade, just enough to set off the delicate clouds of astilbe and snakeroot blossoms.

Flowering thyme fills the spaces between stepping stones and old roses arch overhead with graceful abandon. Nothing is where it's supposed to be and everything is perfect.

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