How to grow a cottage garden in the shade

It can be done. It can even be gorgeous.

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Notes:

• Today’s full newsletter is only available to paid subscribers and members of The Wild Garden club.

• It’s a guide to styling and planting an Australian cottage garden in the SHADE - something I know a lot of people struggle with. Well, it can be done, and I’m gonna show you how!

• If you’d like to read it in full (and to access all of my member-only guides, newsletters, recipes and videos), consider becoming a paying member of Lo fi Life, or upgrading your subscription and becoming a member of my Wild Garden club (you can do this by clicking the button below).

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Here is a cottage garden. Not just any cottage garden. This is Monet’s cottage garden.

And yes, it’s gorgeous and full, rambling and colourful, and yes, we would all like to have something like this in our own backyards.

But what if your backyard looks like this:

Dry. Shady. Empty. Where the hell do you even start? What the hell do you even plant?? If you are looking out at a garden like the one above, dreaming of sun-filled beds overflowing with dutch irises and feeling totally bummed out, take heart! Today we are tackling cottage gardening in the shade.

Set your expectations

Before we start, we need to know what we’re aiming at. Because - like most things in the garden - it pays to set reasonable expectations from the offset and to accept the garden conditions you have rather than those you’d like, so you make good plant choices and increase your chances of success.

Here’s the unvarnished truth: if your garden is full of shade, you’re not going to have any fun trying to grow dutch irises, roses, poppies, hollyhocks, or cornflowers. They’ll look like crap and bugs will eat them. I’m sorry. But it’s ok! I promise you don’t need those plants to have a gorgeous cottage garden.

You just need a new vision. Look at these:

We’re thinking loose, white flowers. We’re thinking dappled shade and snowdrops bursting from the ground. We’re thinking cool, English grotto, big leafy plants, creeping nasturtiums, a quiet place to read a book on a sunny afternoon. There may not be a riot of bright colours, but it is classy and calm, sheltered and secluded. Most of all, it is healthy, because your plants actually like the shade they’re growing in (more on plants to pick in a sec).

I know heaps of people struggle to plant shady gardens, and often the garden inspiration we have for full shade is very jungly - filled with monsteras, rubber plants, philodendrons and devils ivy. This is all well and good (I love those plants too), but today I want to share some other plant options with you if you aren’t into the jungle look. Because if you like the English garden aesthetic, know this: there is shade in England too! And they still manage to fill their gardens with an array of lovely plants. If the English grotto/shady, secret, mossy walled garden is more your style, these ideas are for you.