Cottage Gardens Part Two
Planting for all seasons
Hello and greetings to any new subscribers this week, it’s lovely to have you here. This post is for paid subscribers and it’s a continuation of last week’s introduction to one of my favourite topics: cottage gardens. The latest free Garden Diary post can be seen here.
Today I’m going to romp through each season and encourage you to start a list of plants for your own cottage garden, divided into six seasons - winter, early spring, late spring, early summer, late summer and autumn. You might end up with an overflowing list, but that’s good. You can narrow it down later. You will also end up with a list that looks pretty skewed towards early summer; that’s OK too. You’ll find that among the backbone of the main early summer planting, you’ll only need a handful of other plants within this framework to carry you through other times of year. Those plants don’t entirely disappear as soon as they have finished flowering, and many will come back for another flush if dead headed; they simply retreat backstage for a while, letting other things take the leading roles. It’s worth saying here that a traditional cottage garden would normally be in a fairly sheltered south or west-facing plot. It doesn’t necessarily have to be right in front of the house, as mine is, but the plot should be open and sunny for most of the day, and the soil reasonably good. If you need advice on preparing the soil for your border, have a look at this post I wrote earlier in the year.
So many of the plants that we think of when considering a cottage garden are classic June flowerers, blooming at the high point of the English flower garden year. Foxgloves, peonies, roses, hollyhocks, poppies and so many other plants burst into flower in tandem, building to a colourful crescendo that can swiftly lose steam. The trick is to plant for each season and create an ebb and flow of plants that builds and fades many times throughout the year. The Japanese have 72 micro seasons within the classic four seasons and when you garden, you can understand this, I think, noticing the changes week by week and even day by day. As I write this I am listening, appropriately enough, to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, or more precisely Max Richter’s version, and thinking of the various moods that seasonal planting can create. What follows is a list of basic plants for each season and the different groups of plants to be looking out for. In the weeks to come I’ll take a different group and go into more detail about the specific varieties to seek out.
