Updating the cottage garden

Val Bourne explores the enduring appeal of cottage style and explains how to update it, and John Hoyland singles out hollyhocks as the perfect cottage flower

- John Hoyland

THE cottage garden is alive and well because it’s rather like a comfort blanket – it spins us back in time to a simpler, rosetinted 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 oldfashioned 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 of aspirin and chamomile lotion. There were country flowers, one step away from the field edge or woodland margin, whether it was campanula, bluebell, meadow cranesbill, viola or primrose. And every gap was filled with plants willing to self-seed, all on their own, so not an inch of soil was left.

“The privy path would be lined with snowdrops”