GET GROWING!

YOU DON’T NEED A COTTAGE TO ENJOY A COTTAGE GARDEN

Image credit: Cottage Gardens by Claire Masset.

By LADYBUG

Cottage. Gardens. Two words that transport one to a different season instantly. Put them together in one sentence and they have the power to evoke beautiful dreams.

In the introduction, Claire Masset describes what typically springs to mind when one imagines a cottage garden:

Yours might be a red-brick cottage surrounded by delphiniums, lupins and daisies. Someone else’s might include an old apple tree in bloom, underplanted with tulips and forget-me-nots.

However, a cottage garden is more than a romanticized view of rural life, she writes. In fact, it doesn’t even need a cottage! Over the centuries, it has been a place of sustenance, a haven for plants on the verge of extinction, and an inspiration for designers of much grander gardens. Its history goes back to the medieval cottager’s plot.

In Marche, and in April,

from morning to night:

in sowing and setting,

good housewives delight.

To have in their garden

or some other plot:

to trim up their house

and to furnish their pot.

I learn so much from this book.

• Herbal knowledge was passed down from one generation to the next, based as much on lore as on scientific fact.

• The 1980s saw a trend towards greater labour-saving devices for gardeners, such as hard-landscaping and ever more disease-resistant hybrids. Concerned about this new fashion, a group of enthusiasts formed the Cottage Garden Society in 1982. Geoff Hamilton, appointed its president in 1995, “believed that what characterises a cottage garden is an absence of clear design”.

• Meadow cranesbill is a natural pick for cottage gardens. As are bellflowers, campions, mallows, poppies, snowdrops, lily-of-the valley, columbines. All of these will make themselves at home in the garden and spread happily.

Image credit: Cottage Gardens by Claire Masset.

I smile when I read, When in doubt, plant a geranium. For the above-mentioned meadow cranesbill (and the other members of its family) are prolific self-seeders. I planted a few different colours and now each spring and summer, am on the lookout for those who will give a home to the many, many seedlings.

There are drool-worthy descriptions of gardens of literary greats. Wordsworth’s garden in Lake District and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s garden in Quantock Hills where “friends commented on the proliferation of weeds”.

The National Trust has recreated the garden with cottage plants and vegetables known to have been grown in Coleridge’s time. As a nod to his careless attitude to weeding, ferns have been encouraged to grow in crevices, while wild flowers colonise the ground.

There’s Beatrix Potter’s garden, and George Elliot’s. Anne Hathaway’s (the original Anne Hathaway – Shakespeare’s wife, not the actor!) and Thomas Hardy’s, too. As well as the garden in which Virginia Woolf sought refuge from depression.

Fascinating stuff, which makes it a great reference book that one can go back to. Combine it with the luscious photographs and it becomes a book that will see me through the next few weeks until I can actually get out and about in my own garden.

And though it’s March, it will be a good little while before I will be “sowing and setting”. So I can also study the lists of perennial cottage garden favourites Masset provides and glory in the fact that I have most of them, tucked away in every possible corner!

For as the book will tell you, cottage gardeners acquired plants and seeds in the form of gifts from neighbours and friends... the cottage garden was added to gradually, each new acquisition placed wherever there was a free spot.

There is a beauty in such randomness, and in trusting nature to add its own sprinkling of magic.

Cottage Gardens by Claire Masset is published by National Trust, $26.95.