The Garden History Blog

detail from A Tile-Hung Cottage Seen from the Garden by Turner 1798. 

We all know what a cottage garden looks like don’t we?  We might even be able to describe its main features, although a short  definitive account is quite elusive. So where does the phrase come from? When is it first used? I confess to being stumped when someone asked me recently. You’d think the answer was obvious but actually it isn’t.

I’m sure you knew there is a Cottage Garden Society – large and flourishing – so I thought they’d know if anyone does – but no. Their website doesn’t have  a definition of what constitutes a cottage garden, although there’s a lot about what are nowadays known as cottage garden plants.

The cottage door, by George Shepheard, 1813   

So it was off to  Collins Dictionary which defines it as an informal style of garden which has beds planted with a great variety of traditional flowers. Michael Symes in his handy little Glossary of Garden History says it’s “a garden attached to a cottage where the planting is informal, apparently artless crowded with flowers, vegetables and fruit trees, with trailers climbers and creepers on the woodwork.”    It’s the “apparently artless” which gives away the fact that nowadays a cottage garden is another form of horticultural artifice.

It remains an aspiration for many. “What everyone wanted, from the Lady of the Manor to the humblest suburbanite, was a romantic cottage garden, a private bucolic retreat that would provide an escape from modern world.” (Penelope Hobhouse/ Ambra Edwards in The Story of Gardening).  But was it always so?  I suspect that most people wouldn’t aspire to it if they knew what it used to mean…

A Cottage Garden by Helen Allingham – but where does this style originate?

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