According to my 1964 edition of The Shell Gardens Book, cottage gardens are ‘small and sheltered, packed with flowers and full of haunting scents.’ The quarter of an acre surrounding Grafton Cottage on the edge of Barton-under-Needwood in Staffordshire, ticks all those boxes. In late summer the garden reaches ‘peak cottage’, full of heady scent and intense colour, overflowing borders busy with bees, hoverflies and butterflies, and every square inch used. But unlike the conventional cottage garden where colours are scattered randomly about as if stirred up in a mixing bowl, here the borders are colour-themed, making this a cottage garden with a contemporary twist.
Grafton Cottage, the end house on a row of 19th-century water-workers’ cottages, has been home to Margaret and Peter Hargreaves since they married in 1975. “There was a lawn at the back with
