‘Cottage gardens feel magical'

Frances Tophill shares with TV Times her secrets to creating the nation’s favourite style of garden

- REBECCA FLETCHER

When Alan Titchmarsh and the Love Your Garden team were asked to transform the unloved green spaces belonging to two of our inspirational nurses, they knew exactly which style to choose.

‘The best gardens are the ones you can’t wait to get in, and cottage gardens, with all their romance and nostalgia, are the nation’s favourite,’ smiles Alan, 72. ‘It’s the one that really does make you sit down and smell the roses.’

So, perfect for hard-working district nurse Pat Hastings in Redditch and paediatric A&E nurse Grace Finney in Stoke.

‘We thought they deserved a sanctuary after all they’d been through during the pandemic,’ says Frances Tophill, Alan’s LYG teammate. ‘They needed a beautiful space, to give them respite at the end of a day, and a cottage garden provides exactly that.’

Here, in an exclusive interview, Frances tells TV Times how she turned Pat’s plant-free backyard into a romantic haven for this week’s Love Your Cottage Garden special…

Which five words best sum up a cottage garden?

Romance, summer, blooms, texture, colour. If you can combine all of those things, you have a cottage garden!

What’s so special about a cottage garden?

Pure romance! The style taps into an ideal we all have of what the great British countryside looks like – so a summer afternoon, with the sun going down and flowers in a meadow catching the light. Throw in a lovely thatched cottage and it’s picture-perfect!

Cottage gardens capture something in our imaginations, a feeling of escapism, of simpler, carefree times. They feel magical.