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`Cottage Garden`

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Cottage gardens are English in origin and are typically profusely planted, and random and carefree in form. Their creation or revival in the 1870s followed a fashion for wild gardens and naturalistic plantings, as a relief from mid-century bedding-out schemes using massed colours of brilliant annuals raised in hothouses.

Originally, the late nineteenth-century legend of origin has it, these gardens were created by the workers that lived in the cottages of the villages, to provide them with food and herbs, with flowers planted in for decoration. Fruit trees would have included an apple and a pear, for cider and perry, gooseberries and raspberries. The cottage garden is invariably an enclosed garden, perhaps with a rose-bowered gateway. The more common flowers to the cottage garden were supposed to include hollyhocks, pansies and delphinium, all three essentially nineteenth-century flowers, with the old-fashioned roses that bloomed once a year with rich scents, and simple flowers, like daisies, in addition to the flowering herbs. A well-tended topiary of traditional form, perhaps a cone-shape in tiers, or a conventionalised peacock, would be part of the repertory, to which the leisured creators of "cottage gardens" would add a sun-dial, crazy paving on paths with thyme in the interstices, and a rustic seat, generally missing in the genuine cottage garden. The method of planting closely packed plants was supposed to reduce the amount of weeding and watering required, but planted stone pathways or turf paths, and clipped hedges overgrown with wayward vines, are "cottage garden" features requiring well-timed maintenance.

The actualities can be traced in the issues of The Cottage Gardener 1848-61, edited by George William Johnson, where the emphasis is squarely on the "florist's flowers", carnations and auriculas in fancy varieties that were originally cultivated as a highly-competitive blue-collar hobby. Helen Leach analysed the historical origins of the romanticized "cottage garden" in Cultivating Myths: Fiction, Fact and Fashion in Garden History (Auckland: Godwit, 2000) subjecting the garden style to rigorous historical analysis, along with the ornamental potager and the herb garden, and found their origins less in workingmen's actual gardens in the nineteenth century and more in the leisured classes' discovery of simple hardy plants, in part through the writings of John Claudius Loudon, who helped to design the estate at Great Tew, Oxfordshire, where farm workers were provided with cottages that had architectural quality set in a small garden— about an acre— where they could grow food and keep pigs and chickens, a cottage ideal imposed from the top down. William Robinson's The Wild Garden, published in 1870, contained in the first edition an essay in part IV "The Garden of British Wild Flowers", which was eliminated from later editions. In Robinson's The English Flower Garden, illustrated with cottage gardens from Somerset, Kent and Surrey, he remarked, "One lesson of these little gardens, that are so pretty, is that one can get good effects from simple materials." From the 1890s his acolyte Gertrude Jekyll applied cottage garden plantings to more structured designs in even quite large country houses, and her Colour in the Flower Garden of 1908 has been reprinted as the cottage gardener's bible. In the early twentieth century, however, the term "cottage garden" might be applied even to as sophisticated a garden as Hidcote Manor, which Vita Sackville-West described as "a cottage garden on the most glorified scale" but where the colour harmonies were carefully contrived and controlled, as in the famous "Red Borders"; Vita Sackville-West had taken similar models for her own "cottage garden", one of many "garden rooms" at Sissinghurst Castle; her own idea of a "cottage garden" was as a place where "the plants grow in a jumble, flowering shrubs mingled with Roses, herbaceous plants with bulbous subjects, climbers scrambling over hedges, seedlings coming up wherever they have chosen to sow themselves".

The cottage garden in France is a development of the early twentieth century. Monet's garden at Giverny is the example that comes first to mind.

Today, a cottage garden is often primarily flowers and completely free-form in planting style. Many gardeners attempt to use heirloom varieties of plants in their cottage gardens to preserve the antique flavour of the style.

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