Cottage garden delight

Soft lines, weathered materials, vintage detailing, heirloom plants and an artless, unstructured look define the cottage garden style – a kaleidoscope of hues and textures from the joyous tangle, as flowers and foliage intermingle and jostle together. ‘This is the beautiful chocolate box image everyone has of hollyhocks, roses and colour in a varied tapestry of planting that is very irregular. The use of old-fashioned annuals and even the odd vegetable dotted in as well,’ says Rosy Hardy of the renowned Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants.

Traditionally a practical garden, supplying food and medicine around a farm labourer’s cottage, the style has evolved and is known and copied across the world as a quintessentially English look. The rather romanticised idea of a country idyll reached a peak in the Victorian times, when the style became more decorative rather than with a productive focus, and was further gentrified by