Updating the cottage garden
THE cottage garden is alive and well because it’s rather like a comfort blanket – it spins us back in time to a simpler, rose-tinted age. We love roses round the door and bees hovering above a haze of English lavender. And we still adore the spicy clove scent of old-fashioned pinks, drifting through damp evening air after rain, or a stand of colourful hollyhocks leaning towards the light to escape the cottage wall. They all remind us of a golden age, like one of those picturesque scenes from an old-fashioned box of chocolates featuring the perfect thatched cottage.
Glorious jumble
The focus of every cottage garden was the modest dwelling. Only those with a grander vision could admire mighty oaks in a rolling landscape as they gazed outwards over a ha-ha. Cottage gardens were inevitably glorious jumbles – the necessary mixture of culinary and medicinal herbs needed before the age when Jesse Boot’s chain of chemists gave us a supply
