How to grow an English cottage garden

(When you don't live in England)

The English cottage garden; romantic, rambling, floral and wild. Pastel blooms intermingling with fragrant herbs and leafy vegetables. Roses climbing up archways. Blossoms falling from crabapple trees in the soft breeze while some sexually frustrated Jane Austin dame in a high-necked dress and uncomfortable boots pulls potatoes from the ground wishing she had voting rights and didn’t have to cook dinner or marry the town’s only weirdo bachelor.

I guess historically it’s been a bit of a mixed bag.

The good news, though, is it’s 2024 and we really can have it all. We can have our climbing roses, we can eat our cake and wear trousers but not bras and if someone tries to grope our bums in a dimly lit bar we can GROPE THEM RIGHT BACK and say ‘how’d you like THAT bucko’. Which is, of course, something I just made up and have never done.

And what’s more, we can live in a sweltering, dry, harsh Australian climate and STILL revel in the joys of growing a cottage garden! Don’t believe me? Read on.

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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 - something people claim can’t be done in Perth. Well, it can, and this newsletter will explain how!

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Photo by Michelle Troop (taken in the garden on our wedding day!)

A brief history of the cottage garden

Cottage gardening didn’t actually begin as an intentional style. Originally, cottage gardens were just practical spaces for growing fruits, vegetables and herbs. In fact, some cottage gardens allegedly grew nothing but potatoes. These early cottage gardens were planted by working class people, often middle-ranking servants of English royal or noble households. They were spaces primarily used to raise animals for meat, bees for honey and herbs for medicine.

There is some debate about when The Cottage Garden became a specific style of gardening, although it seems that at some point the wealthier ‘leisured’ class noticed what had been planted under their noses in the back alleys of their estates and decided to make it a ‘style’. Maybe they wanted to prove that they were *men of the people*, down-to-earth chillers, unpretentious and cool, and obviously a bed full of potatoes is the best way to do that. If nothing else, it was probably cheaper than giving their servants a raise.

So, instead of hoighty toighty formal gardens with perfectly trimmed lawns and snobbish hedgerows, these affluent aristocrats with hearts of gold decided they wanted gardens with overflowing borders, rambling climbers and a general intermixing of edibles with ornamentals.

The idea of an informal planting style seems to go in and out of fashion. As does the idea of gardening for food and practicality. The 1990s gardens I remember from my childhood were certainly not cottage gardens. They were primarily filled with spiky, drought-tolerant agaves, bloody mondo grass everywhere, some parched palms and uniformly sad-looking Moses-in-the-cradle plants in every border.

This is Moses-in-the-cradle and while I theoretically believe that all plants are beautiful I would burn this overused beast to the ground.

So I guess it’s not altogether surprising that a lot of people I speak to assume that cottage gardens just ‘can’t be done’ in Australia. We tend to think that our climate dictates planting spiky monocultures of drought-resistant plants in styles that are antithetical to the cascading flowers and soft borders of the English cottage garden.

Fortunately that’s not remotely true!

The Australian Cottage Garden - it’s a thing!

There are two things to know about growing cottage gardens in Australia.

First, plenty of plants that work in English cottage gardens will work just fine here as long as we provide them with good soil and enough water during summer. Check out my list of traditional cottage garden plants that work in Australia (below) to see what plants grow well in our climate.

Second, you don’t actually have to grow traditional English plants to have a rambling, sprawling and very beautiful cottage style garden. And there are many gorgeous native Australian, South African and Mediterranean plants that are well-suited to our climate and will give your garden a beautiful cottage garden style. Take a look at my list of non-traditional cottage garden plants (also below) for some ideas of what will work well.

Photo by Michelle Troop

To be honest, I don’t even think you have to limit yourselves to plants that look ‘cottagey’. Apparently my garden looks like a cottage garden, but it’s filled with a pretty eclectic assortment of plants, from banana and mango trees to aloes and sweet peas. Maybe our first mistake is thinking we need to be beholden to any kind of planting style in the first place. My rule is: if something lives happily in my garden it is very welcome to stay, no matter where it comes from or what ‘style’ it supposedly fits. As long as it’s not Moses-in-the-cradle. Or Mondo grass.

Traditional plants that work

This is by no means an exhaustive list and I’m sure that there are many more traditional cottage garden plants that will also work in an Australian climate. These are the ones I can vouch for because they’ve worked for me.