How to stop your cottage garden looking messy

8 easy tricks to add just a *sprinkle* of order to the glorious chaos

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Notes:

• Today’s full newsletter is only available to paid subscribers.

• It’s a list of my 8 favourite tricks to inject a little bit of order into a cottage garden. Not too much order, mind you. Just enough to make it look beautifully wild but not messy.

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Our 18 month old has decided that day naps are for suckers and that cool babies rage til 10pm so my usual policy of writing-while-he-sleeps has, this week, become a total shambles.

That is why today’s newsletter is coming to you at 3pm (he finally succumbed to the soporific effects of my ‘serene ocean music’ playlist and me being as boring as humanly possible), and why it is going to be SHORT, SHARP and to the point.

After all, we all have busy lives, we all want rambling cottage gardens that straddle the line between order and chaos, and in all likelihood if I try to write anything overly verbose he’ll wake up before I’m done, grin wildly at me and fling himself at the keyboard.

Here are ten ways to keep your cottage garden looking ‘good wild’ (rambling, flower filled, overflowing) and not ‘bad wild’ (messy, unkempt and chaotic - ie the current state of my hair, and vast swathes of my life in general).

How to stop your cottage garden looking messy

These tips all really boil done to one main principle: that it is the JUXTAPOSITION of order and chaos that our eyes find pleasing.  That sweet spot, where order and chaos combine in a glorious dance, is where the real beauty in our gardens lie.

Typically, if you like the cottage style, you’ll already have the ‘wildly chaotic’ side of things down pat. So today our focus is going to be on ten quick and easy ways to inject a little contrasting order into your garden, to complement the chaos.

Edging

Edge your garden beds and your garden will be INSTANTLY transformed.

This is not hyperbole this is just a fact. Garden beds with no edging tend to spill out onto lawns and pathways. It can be done well and can look nice, but it is much easier and tends to look better if you add edging.

Edging garden beds helps to reign in the chaos, ties a nice neat bow around the wild and rambling gardens and actually enhances their beauty. It also offers a tonne of practical benefits (your soil and mulch won’t fall onto your paths, grass won’t creep into your beds).

Clipped bushes

Many of my favourite cottage garden plants are a little freeform and loose - salvias that balloon out into sprawling shrubs, hollyhocks that grow straight and tall then tip over without warning. You’ll get away with this random plant chaos more easily if you ALSO chuck in a few well behaved plants and clip them into tight little balls or neat little hedges.

This small injection of ‘obvious human effort’ amid the wilderness creates great contrast and looks gorgeous (and clipping plants into neat shapes is actually incredibly satisfying). Great plants to prune into balls or hedges include: viburnum, Lily pily, Orange jessamine, wormwood, Westringia and pittosporum.

Contrasting foliage & flowers

Gardens look messier and more chaotic when you can’t easily discern individual plants. When the whole garden is one crazy fruit-tingle hodge-podge of plants, your eye has trouble making out distinct shapes and gets bewildered.

One way of combating this (I’ll talk about another in a tic) is to ensure you place distinct plants with contrasting foliage next to each other.